Warning: US 911 system on the brink of its own emergency after several cities, states, and counties face outages

Towns and cities across the country have been facing 911 outages, some lasting hours, like on June 18th when the statewide 911 system went down for nearly two hours.

According to USA Today, in that one incident, about seven million people went almost two hours with no 911 service. These crashes are shining a light on the nation's fragmented emergency response system. Outages have hit at least eight states so far this year, becoming more of a feature than a bug in the system.

Many of the issues plaguing the emergency communications include the wide disparities in the systems' age and capabilities and funding of 911 systems across the country. Some cities, states, and counties have modernized their systems or are in the process of making plans to upgrade, but many others are lagging.

The 911 system is usually supported by fees added on to phone bills, but state and local governments also use general funds or other resources to help fund the system. Jonathan Gilad, vice president of government affairs at the National Emergency Number Association said in a statement, "Now there are haves and have-nots. Next-generation 911 shouldn't be for people who happen to have an emergency in a good location."

As these outages continue, federal legislation that could steer billions of dollars into modernizing the entire 911 system remains held up in Congress. George Kelemen, executive director of the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies said in a statement, "This is a national security imperative. In a crisis — a school shooting or house fire or, God forbid, a terrorist attack — people call 911 first. The system can't go down."

In 1968, the U.S debuted its single, universal 911 emergency number as a way to simplify crisis response. However, instead of a seamless national program, the 911 response network has evolved into a massive puzzle of many interlocking pieces. According to federal data, there are more than 6,000 911 call centers to handle an estimated 240 million emergency calls each year. 

A survey done in February by the National Emergency Number Association, which sets standards and advocates for 911, shows that more than three-quarters of call centers experienced outages in the prior 12 months. In April, widespread 911 outages affected millions in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Texas. 

In February, tens of thousands of people in areas of California, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, and other states lost cellphone service, including some 911 services, from an outage. In June, Verizon agreed to pay a $1.05 million fine to settle a Federal Communications Commission probe into a December 2022 outage that affected 911 calls in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

Lawmakers have looked at modernizing 911 systems by tapping revenue the FCC gets from auctioning off the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Legislation that would allocate almost $15 billion in grants from auction proceeds to speed deployment of next-generation 911 in every state unanimously passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May 2023.

Other bills have been introduced by various lawmakers. For now, none have advanced. Nine former FCC chairs wrote lawmakers in February, urging them to make 911 upgrades a national priority. They wrote, "Whatever the funding source, the need is urgent and the time to act is now."