California emergency 911 networks in Oakland and Riverside County experience sudden outage

A sudden outage crippled 911 operations in two major California jurisdictions on Thursday morning. Oakland Police Department experienced computer glitches late Wednesday, causing both emergency and non-emergency lines to go down, and forced the city to divert calls to the neighboring Alameda County Sheriff’s office, which could only handle priority-one calls. Meanwhile, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department received reports that callers using cell phones could not get through, leading officials to issue a public safety alert with an alternative emergency number.

The alert instructed residents to use the backup line only for genuine emergencies and to stay on the line for updates. No cause for the simultaneous failures has been determined, and restoration efforts are ongoing.