New York City 911 System Missed 1,700 Calls Due To Software Update
Longtime Slashdot reader belmolis writes: Part of New York City's 911 emergency system was offline from about 3:13 a.m. to 10 a.m. on August 18th due to a software update, according to Medical Daily. Of 5,659 calls to the Bronx call center during that period, about 1,700 calls connected but could not be heard by emergency operators. Some were rerouted to other call centers, but an estimated 400…
A software update for New York City's 911 emergency system caused 1,700 calls to go unanswered from around 3:13 a.m. to 10 a.m. on August 18th, reported Medical Daily. During this time, 5,659 calls were made to the Bronx call center, but 1,700 of those calls were heard but not comprehended by emergency operators. Some of these calls were redirected to other centers, but approximately 400 direct human callers did not receive assistance.
The potential ramifications of delayed emergency response are still unknown. The city did not inform the public and only disclosed the information upon request from journalists. The origin of the faulty software is unclear, and neither its specific changes nor the reason for its failure have been determined. Motorola pushed the update, but the exact nature of the update and why it led to the outage remain undetermined.
The city is currently investigating whether the update was sufficiently tested and if the same software release was applied elsewhere.
Written by urgent.news from Slashdot's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
