SE Minnesota 911 Outage Blamed on Faulty Equipment
St. Paul, MN (KROC-AM News) - The 911 service outage that hit southeastern Minnesota yesterday is now being blamed on faulty equipment.
CenturyLink, which now operates under the name Lumen Technologies, is the provider of Minnesota's 911 service. It was initially reported that a cut fiber optic line was to blame for the outage but the company now puts the blame on a bad card connected to a large national fiber line in Green Bay Wisconsin. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety says the issue was resolved and the service restored after engineers rebooted the equipment.
The outage lasted from around 1 PM until about 8 PM and affected residents of Olmsted, Dodge, Freeborn, Mower, Wabasha, Winona, Rice, and Steele Counties. A news release says the equipment failure created a situation where the 911 caller could hear the dispatcher but the dispatcher could not hear the caller.
The news release also notes this is the final year of the state's $29 million contract with Lumen Technologies for 911 service.