911 services down in multiple US states

guest · Sep 28, 2020

911 services down in multiple US states
Most services are now restored. No technical reason for the outage given
September 29, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/911-services-down-in-multiple-us-states/

Emergency services across at least 14 US states have reported outages of their 911 lines on Monday.

Issues were reported by police departments in counties across Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
Impacted counties reported losing connectivity for 911 phone and SMS services, but did not provide any technical details about the source of the outage.

"ATTENTION: The 911 lines are not operational nationwide. This is for phone calls and text messaging," the Minneapolis police department wrote on Twitter earlier today at the start of the outage.
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PSAPs are telephony systems where 911 (or 112) emergency calls are terminated before reaching the actual emergency service call centers. They're choke points in 911 traffic, which explains why multiple emergency services across different states had issues. According to reports on Twitter, a PSAP provider named Intrado was most likely behind the 911 outage today.
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EASTER · Sep 29, 2020

Most services are now restored. No technical reason for the outage given
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Of course not.

guest · Sep 29, 2020

911 outages have become a fact of life — are we even fixing this?
The names have changed, but the failures continue
September 29, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/29/21494652/911-outage-centurylink-lumen-intrado

In 2014, after what we described as “frequent failures,” a previous administration’s FCC attempted to change how the United States’ emergency 911 system works, including making it clear who’s responsible when multiple states inexplicably lose the ability to dial 911 at once.
Some of that accountability might have come in handy this week — because we still don’t know what caused yesterday’s 911 outage. And it’s not clear anything would change even if we knew.

We reached out to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to confirm that the outage was even happening, and if so, if they could steer us to the root cause. None of the three major cellular carriers would even answer the question.
The FCC didn’t reply to a request for comment, period.
We also reached out to Microsoft, thinking perhaps the 911 outage might have something to do with the Azure outage earlier in the day.

“We’ve seen no indication that the multi-state 911 outage was a result of yesterday’s Azure service interruption,” the company told us.
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Finally, we reached out to CenturyLink (which recently rebranded to Lumen, sort of) because the state of Minnesota apparently thought the internet services provider had something to do with it, and because CenturyLink / Lumen has been known to have been involved in some major 911 outages before.

Sure enough, CenturyLink/Lumen confirmed it was involved:

“Earlier this evening, a Lumen 911 vendor experienced an outage affecting a number of customers in multiple states for about an hour. All services have been restored,” reads a statement provided to us.
But as KrebsOnSecurity reports, both Lumen and its partner Intrado are blaming each other for the 911 outage, not taking responsibility themselves. As mentioned, Lumen says its “vendor” experienced the outage — but Intrado is apparently telling county officials that “our 911 service provider” was the one with network failures.

That’s less than helpful, of course, even if it’s unsurprising. Nobody wants to be the one at fault. But who would even hold them accountable?
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KrebsOnSecurity: Who’s Behind Monday’s 14-State 911 Outage?

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Lumen blamed the issue on Intrado.
It may be no accident that both of these companies are now operating under new names, as this would hardly be the first time a problem between the two of them has disrupted 911 access for a large number of Americans.

In 2019, Intrado/West and CenturyLink agreed to pay $575,000 to settle an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) into an Aug. 2018 outage that lasted 65 minutes. The FCC found that incident was the result of a West Safety technician bungling a configuration change to the company’s 911 routing network.
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zapjb · Sep 30, 2020

This & apple services going down at the same. Anybody else thinking a nation-state testing their nefarious wares.

xxJackxx · Sep 30, 2020

zapjb said: ↑

This & apple services going down at the same. Anybody else thinking a nation-state testing their nefarious wares.
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My first thought was a possible ransomware attempt but I could go either way.

guest · Oct 3, 2020

911 vendor Intrado takes responsibility for widespread outage
October 2, 2020
https://statescoop.com/911-outage-intrado/

A 911 service outage that affected 14 states for more than an hour Monday evening was caused by a networking misconfiguration at the technology firm Intrado, the company told StateScoop.

The incident marks the latest in a series of outages in recent years that can be traced back to mistakes at Intrado, which acts as a subcontractor for larger companies that operate the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. This most recent incident has captured the attention of federal officials and could prompt reform in public safety regulations.

In a statement, Intrado said the outages lasted for 77 minutes Monday before service was restored.

“Initial analysis identified an internal networking component that was not correctly forwarding traffic, resulting in the impairment of call delivery,” the statement reads.
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If 911 outages are rare, large multi-state outages like the one this week are even less common. Brandon Abley, the technical issues director for the National Emergency Number Association, told StateScoop that a large outage happens maybe once every two years.

“Generally 911 systems are built to a high degree of reliability and resiliency,” Abley said. “[...] it is technology and even the most reliable technologies do have impairments from time to time.”
“Everyone wants to know the answers right away and it’s just hard to give them because the United States does not have a single 911 system, so it’s very hard to trace the root cause,” Abley said.
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This isn’t the first major outage caused by technical issues at Intrado.

“When you dial 9-1-1, you need it to work,” she wrote. “The FCC needs to investigate and get to the bottom of what happened here so it doesn’t happen again.”
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