According to Lumen, South Dakota’s 911 telecommunications provider, a company erecting a light pole in Kansas City, Missouri, was the cause of a 911 outage that affected hundreds of calls for emergency services throughout South Dakota and beyond on Wednesday night.

With its headquarters located in Louisiana, Lumen, formerly known as CenturyLink, stated that an unidentified third party was to blame for the outage, but it did not elaborate on how the placement of the light pole contributed to the problem.

911 services in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Nevada were affected by the outage. Although Lumen stated it did not offer 911 service in Texas, there was another reported outage of the service in that state.

An email from a business spokesperson to South Dakota Searchlight stated, “Our techs identified the issue and worked hard to fix it as quickly as possible.” “We sincerely regret any inconvenience caused, and we value your understanding and patience.”

Other failures with 911

This year, there has been at least two instances of 911 service outages in South Dakota via Lumen. In order to provide “Next Generation 911 services,” South Dakota inked a contract with Lumen in 2019; the agreement was then extended through 2029. Up to $36.33 million can be purchased under the deal.

Siouxland Proud reported that during a January outage in southeast South Dakota, residents in Lincoln, Union, Miner, and Minnehaha Counties were unable to contact 911 via a landline for several hours. Over half of Nebraska’s 911 centers were unable to accept calls for approximately ten hours due to the unintentional cutting of two independent fiber optic links in Omaha and Minneapolis last year, according to Lumen.

Following an outage in 2020 that affected South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and North Carolina, the Federal Communications Commission looked into whether Lumen and three other firms had neglected to deliver 911 calls and promptly alert customers who were in the public safety sector. Lumen settled by committing to pay a $3.8 million civil fine and putting in place a compliance plan.

The FCC announced on Wednesday night that it was looking into the most recent failures on X, the former Twitter platform.

In a follow-up statement released on Thursday, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “It is crucial that your 911 call is answered in an emergency. To determine the source and extent of the multi-state 911 failures that happened last night, the FCC has already started its investigation.

Officials say that response times are unaffected.

The state Department of Public Safety reports that the outage on Wednesday started about 8 p.m. Central time and that service was back online by 11 p.m. Across the state, dispatchers and public safety authorities were compelled to swiftly alter their response times to incoming service requests due to the outage.

At a press conference on Thursday, Assistant Chief of Sioux Falls Fire Mike Gramlick stated that the city had never seen an outage of “this magnitude or duration.”

Officials say that response times are unaffected.

The state Department of Public Safety reports that the outage on Wednesday started at about 8 p.m. Central time and that service was back online by 11 p.m. Across the state, dispatchers and public safety authorities were compelled to swiftly alter their response times to incoming service requests due to the outage.

At a press conference on Thursday, Assistant Chief of Sioux Falls Fire Mike Gramlick stated that the city had never seen an outage of “this magnitude or duration.”

About nine o’clock at night, the city of Sioux Falls issued a news release regarding the outage, which was followed by a phone notice to locals. According to Gramlick’s statement following the press conference, the local dispatch officer received 112 calls for service during the outage. Of those, 79 were phone calls that were diverted to another line and 33 were text messages.

According to Gramlick, there are a lot more text messages requesting 911 assistance than usual.

Communications staff used caller ID information to promptly return calls and attend to the needs of those in other parts of the state, such as Pennington County, which has its county seat in Rapid City. There was a “less than second” delay in connecting with the caller and dispatching emergency assistance, according to Pennington County 911 office coordinator Chad Landis.

Four more dispatchers were sent in to handle the increased call load, according to Landis, who stated that eight dispatchers were initially keeping an eye on the phone lines during the outage.

We still have not received answers to our questions on the function of Lumen in 911 security, why the outage did not impact it, and how the 911 text messaging service operates from the state Department of Public Safety.

When South Dakota Searchlight asked the Lumen representative about the company’s next course of action and its plans to stop additional outages, the agent did not reply.

Landis desires clarification.

“Everyone is aware that 911 should be available in case of an emergency. It was unsuccessful, according to Landis. Therefore, I believe the questions that need to be answered are why this happened, how it happened, and what can be done to keep it from happening in the future. These are important issues that require examination beyond South Dakota.

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