Alexandria, VA – Today, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (Bureau) of the Federal Communications Commission presented and released a report and recommendations on the cause and impact of an April 2014 multistate 9-1-1 outage. The outage resulted in the loss of 9-1-1 service for more than 11 million people in seven states for up to 6 hours, with more than 6,600 calls not reaching a public safety answering point (PSAP). The Bureau found that the outage was caused by a software coding error in a 9-1-1 call-routing facility in Colorado.

APCO President John Wright applauded the Bureau’s work, stating “the Bureau performed a commendable job in its careful review and attention to investigating the scope and causes of this outage, and APCO agrees that lapses like this need to be avoided at all costs.” President Wright continued, ”as Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) across the country transition from legacy networks to an IP-based, Next Generation 9-1-1 ecosystem, all stakeholders must remain vigilant to ensure the public remains as confident as ever that 9-1-1 calls will be delivered to PSAPs. We look forward to working with the Commission, industry leaders, and other key 9-1-1 stakeholders in order to strike the right balance between embracing 9-1-1 innovation and preserving network resiliency and redundancy.”

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APCO International® (www.apcointl.org)
APCO International is the world’s oldest and largest organization of public safety communications professionals and supports the largest U.S. membership base of any public safety association. It serves the needs of public safety communications practitioners worldwide – and the welfare of the general public as a whole.