City officials are still trying to determine why New York’s 911 call system failed for seven hours on Tuesday.
A glitch in the system’s Bronx call center, one of two Public Safety Answering Centers in the five boroughs, disabled emergency calls between 3:13 a.m. And 10 a.m., according to the NYPD. The Brooklyn center remained fully operational during the outage.
About 1,700 callers “were impacted,” City Hall spokesman Jeremy Edwards said on Wednesday. “We believe up to 400 New Yorkers may have been unable to connect with a 911 call taker” during the breakdown.
The problem also left operators unable to hear callers who did get through, Edwards added. A total of 5,659 calls for EMS, FDNY and NYPD response came into the 911 system during the seven-hour window.
Sources attributed the issue to a possible software failure and ruled out a malicious cyber attack, according to the initial reporting. The affected center, known as PSAC II, serves parts of the city alongside the Brooklyn-based PSAC I.
“The issue has since been resolved, and PSAC II is running normally,” Edwards said in a statement. “All 911 calls have been connected and responded to by a call taker since 10:19 a.m. Yesterday.”
Edwards continued that the city had “performed intensive overnight testing on the system, and are monitoring the call delivery, traffic paths, and volume 24/7 in close coordination with our technical providers to ensure there are no additional service impacts.”
On Wednesday, City Hall officials said the investigation into the root cause remained active. “Our investigation into the circumstances of this incident is ongoing,” Edwards said. “We are focused on understanding exactly what happened, ensuring that affected callers receive the appropriate follow-up and taking all necessary steps to prevent this from happening again.”
In the viral moment that put fresh scrutiny on the city’s emergency infrastructure, the Tuesday failure marked the latest chapter in a long-troubled modernization effort. The Big Apple overhauled its antiquated 911 system beginning in 2004 under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but the project was fraught with delays, cost overruns and persistent mismanagement that boosted the price tag past $2 billion, according to a 2015 report by the city Department of Investigation.
The current outage comes as the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office this year, grapples with aging city systems. The 2015 investigation found that poor oversight and planning problems had plagued the 911 upgrade for more than a decade.
City officials have not announced any public hearings or independent reviews of the failure beyond the ongoing internal investigation.