An Anchorage-based telecommunications company says “a fault in transport equipment” led to an outage that took down local 911 services for more than 24 hours over the weekend.
“Our teams worked continuously through the weekend using spare equipment and alternative restoral methods to resolve the issue and restore service as quickly as possible,” Alaska Communications spokesperson Heather Marron said in an interview Monday.
The outage disrupted 911 calls in Anchorage from Friday evening until late Saturday. But Anchorage police spokeswoman Gina Romero emphasized that callers were still able to reach police through the department’s non-emergency 311 phone number, as well as its main line at 907-786-8900.
“This was communicated and updated in RAVE alerts, on the APD website and on Facebook throughout the weekend,” Romero said by email Monday. “Additionally, APD has an internal process in place that allows dispatchers to see the calls that were trying to come in. Dispatchers were then able to call those people back during the outage.”
Marron and Romero said they were still gathering more information on the outage Monday, including its exact cause and an estimate of how many local 911 calls were affected.
Alaska Communications said in a Facebook post that some voice services were restored Sunday morning, and Marron said they were fully restored by 7:30 p.m. that day.
There were no reports of 911-related outages beyond Anchorage. Wasilla police reported on Facebook Friday that 911 service in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough was still working. State Department of Public Safety spokesperson Austin McDaniel said by email Monday that neither of the department’s contract dispatch centers in Wasilla or Soldotna were affected, with no word of wider outages beyond Anchorage reaching state officials.
Alaska is no stranger to 911 outages, with a water leak onto network equipment at telecommunications firm GCI leading to an hours-long outage in 2023 – months before a fiber optic cable cut in the Arctic Ocean caused 911 outages across Northwest Alaska. Last year, Alaska 911 services were affected by a global technological meltdown, caused by a routine software update malfunctioning at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
