Harrisburg, PA – The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) today shared findings of a preliminary report on the cause of the intermittent outages within the Next-Generation 911 (NG911) system across the Commonwealth earlier this month. The preliminary root cause analysis found that the issues were due to a defect in an operating system, which resulted in intermittent disruptions to NG911 call delivery. The disruptions are not believed to be the result of a cyber-attack.
As soon as the intermittent outages started, our vendors and partner public safety organizations began to investigate the cause and take steps to resolve the issue. We activated the Emergency Alert System and issued Wireless Emergency Alerts as a precautionary measure to notify everyone in Pennsylvania of the issue and to follow county-based back up plans should they not be able to reach the 911 centers by calling the traditional three-digit phone number.
— PEMA Executive Deputy Director Jeff Boyle
Next Generation Core Services (NGCS) are the systems and components used to process and route calls from phones to 911 centers. There are four instances of the NGCS which are located at two data centers within the NG911 system in Pennsylvania.
The NG911 system in Pennsylvania functions as follows:
- A caller dials “911.”
- The call is transported to one of the data centers for processing by the NGCS, where the NCGS determines the caller’s location and delivers the call to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP, commonly called 911 center).
- The PSAP processes the call and dispatches appropriate emergency services.
PEMA would like to thank the staff at the 61 Public Safety Answering Points for their hard work and dedication to serving their communities during this event.
A more detailed analysis of this issue and corrective measures to enhance system redundancy are currently being executed. When complete, additional information that is not security-sensitive will be released.
PEMA suggests as a part of your personal preparedness plan, save your county 911 center ten-digit non-emergency number on your cellphone or write it down in an easily accessible place if you have an emergency and for some reason cannot reach 911.