State Investigating 911 Outage Across Massachusetts

By Colin A. Young

Local police and fire departments said Tuesday afternoon that the statewide 911 emergency system is out of service, and state officials said they are investigating the cause.

The outage comes as a dangerous heat wave settles in over Massachusetts and as Boston prepares to host a victory parade for the NBA champion Boston Celtics on Friday. The State 911 Department said it was aware of the issue and was investigating.

“Individuals who are experiencing an emergency are asked to contact the direct line for their local police department. We will provide further information as soon as it becomes available,” the department said.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu called attention to the outage early Tuesday afternoon at the beginning of her press conference with public safety officials to talk about this week’s extreme heat and Friday’s Celtics parade.

“Never a dull moment,” the mayor said. “And we just wanted to start actually with a notification that currently the statewide 911 system is down and calls are not going through. We’ve been in touch with the state and with all the relevant officials to work on getting this resolved.”

The outage also came up, albeit in an entirely different way, during the Mass. Department of Transportation board meeting taking place Tuesday afternoon.

“Are we getting hit by a tornado? I left my phone on the desk … Hopefully it’s not an alarm for the project,” MassDOT Highway Administrator Jonathan Gulliver said when his presentation on the Allston multimodal project was interrupted by at least one phone in the MassDOT board room going off with an alert about the 911 outage.