Pennsylvania officials report they have fixed the statewide 911 disruption

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency reported that 911 services have been restored in the commonwealth, though the cause is still under investigation.

The statewide NextGen 911, which provides the network services for the commonwealth, detected a situation around 2 p.m. Friday where calls were intermittently failing to be delivered, according to Randy Padfield, director of Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency. This was originally detected with calls going into the Delaware County 911 call center.

PEMA officials said they worked late into the night with county 911 offices and tech experts “to restore this critical emergency service to its full capacity.”

“We worked with counties to fully test that the system is operational,” PEMA officials said on its Facebook page. “Please do not call 911 for testing purposes; leave lines open for true emergencies.”

Bob Dowd, director of the Lebanon County Department of Emergency Services, said that all 911 call delivery services to Lebanon County have been restored as of 11 p.m. Friday evening.

Padfield said the issue was “an anomaly” for officials that work with the NextGen 911 system, which he described as working flawlessly through issues that include severe weather events.

“It could be a software issue, it could be a hardware issue,” he said in a press conference Friday. “What we know is that it doesn’t appear to be the result of a software update that was pushed, based on our communications with the Next Gen 911 service provider.”

PEMA reported that officials were still identifying the root cause of the issues with the system, and said they would update residents to a cause “as soon as we can.”

This is an ongoing story. Please check back for updates.

Matthew Toth is a reporter for the Lebanon Daily News. Reach him at mtoth@ldnews.com or on X at @DAMattToth.