The 9-1-1 Paradox
Emergency call lines in the United States rarely fail, yet they're more vulnerable than ever.
The warnings began trickling in around supper time on Wednesday night.
AT&T was experiencing what officials in several states described as a nationwide outage affecting 9-1-1 services. The problem was that some AT&T customers who dialed 9-1-1 in at least 18 states couldn’t reach emergency dispatchers—and instead would hear either a busy signal or a phone that kept ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing.
It was nearly three hours before public officials gave the all clear that the issue had been resolved.
AT&T declined repeated requests for information about the scope and cause of the
