Statewide South Dakota 911 outage caused by hurricane in southern US, provider says • South Dakota Searchlight

A second statewide 911 outage this year is suspected to have been caused by Hurricane Beryl making landfall in Texas on Tuesday night and damaging network infrastructure, according to South Dakota’s 911 telecommunications provider Lumen, formerly known as CenturyLink. 

Investigations into the cause are still ongoing, said spokesman Matthew Villarreal.

“Our techs worked hard to fix an intermittent disruption affecting some customers’ ability to reach 911 in South Dakota and parts of Nebraska,” Villarreal said in an emailed statement. “We appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding.”

South Dakota signed its contract with Lumen for “Next Generation 911 services” in 2019 and has since renewed the contract until 2029. The contract is for up to $36.33 million.

Lumen is headquartered in Louisiana, with network infrastructure running throughout the country. April’s statewide 911 outage in South Dakota was caused by a company installing a light pole in Kansas City, Missouri, the company said at the time.

In addition to the statewide outages, an outage in January disrupted 911 service in southeastern South Dakota, leaving customers in Lincoln, Union, Miner and Minnehaha counties unable to call 911 with a landline for hours, according to reporting from Siouxland Proud.

This week’s hurricane also caused an AT&T network outage impacting 911 calls in Texas and Louisiana.

Company with $36 million SD 911 contract says outage caused by Missouri light pole installation

Sioux Falls residents were without 911 services for about six hours between two outages Tuesday night and into early Wednesday morning, said Michael Gramlick, Sioux Falls assistant fire chief and director of Metro Communications. The outage affected hundreds of calls for emergency services throughout South Dakota.

Gramlick said the state’s largest city was “immediately aware” of the outage, and its Metro Communications took steps learned from April’s outage to troubleshoot and keep 911 services up and running, including alerting residents to call a non-emergency number or text 911. 

The city had 522 calls for service (including text messages and calls to the non-emergency number) during the outage — twice as many calls as a typical day. Many were “test calls” by residents, Gramlick added, and all calls received a call back from 911 services.

The two outages are forcing 911 communications offices — both locally and at the state level — to reevaluate redundancy efforts, Gramlick said.

“We don’t want to believe that this is a regular occurrence, but our job is to plan for those occurrences,” Gramlick said. 

Stephanie Olson, deputy director of operations for Pennington County 911, said the western side of the state experienced a similar outage timeline. Staff in the dispatch center were notified of the first outage Tuesday night by the state 911 coordinator, but noticed the second outage themselves.

“We can see when someone is attempting to call 911, but then our phone system doesn’t ring, so we know there’s a problem with the phone system,” Olson said. The county called back 32 residents when the initial call didn’t come through.

Residents calling from Verizon and AT&T phones were calling a dead line, Olson explained, while some T-Mobile and landline phones were diverted to alternate 911 centers in Canada and Colorado that handle misrouted calls.

“We’re learning to continue educating our staff and citizens on the capabilities of 911 and that text is available. That was up and running all night,” Olson said. “If they call and can’t get through, we have redundancies in place.”

State agency to probe why 911 network backup systems failed to work

The Federal Communications Commission announced after this year’s earlier statewide outage it would investigate recent outages across the country. The FCC recently declined to provide an update on the investigation to South Dakota Searchlight.

“As a general practice, we don’t comment on investigations,” an FCC spokesperson said in an email.

After a 2020 outage in South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Utah and North Carolina, the commission investigated whether Lumen, in addition to three other companies, failed to deliver 911 calls and timely notify public safety customers. In a settlement, Lumen agreed to implement a compliance plan and pay a $3.8 million civil penalty.

Lumen serves the Omaha area and some other eastern Nebraska counties. The company is being investigated there for recent outages in 2023 and earlier this year, according to the Nebraska Examiner.

The South Dakota Department of Public Safety, which manages the state contract with Lumen, did not issue a news release about this week’s outage and did not respond to emailed questions from South Dakota Searchlight by the time this article published.