INDIANAPOLIS — After a massive 911 outage affected Hoosiers across the state in February, Call 6 Investigates is now learning the failure of a single piece of technology is behind the outage.
Just after 7 p.m. on Friday, February 15, the state's service provider that handles and routes 911 calls from cell phones to emergency dispatch centers across the Hoosier State stopped working. The failure caused people in some counties like Madison, Hamilton, Tippecanoe, Henry, Hancock, Tipton, Randolph and more across the state to not get through to dispatchers if they called 911.
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New information obtained by Call 6 Investigates places the blame on a technical glitch on a single piece of technology that helps direct and route bites of data between servers, computers and the internet.
If you call 911 from a cell phone in the state of Indiana, the call is run through servers at INdigital, the statewide service provider for wireless 911 calls. The servers process the emergency call and then route it to the correct 911 center from where the call is coming from.
"Following routine maintenance on the IN911 network, a core router was replaced," INdigital President Mark Grady said. "It was one of four identical devices."
INdigital tells Call 6, the replacement device was the same, but a newer version. That new router did not behave in the same way as the other routers on February 15th and caused a domino effect, slowing down the processing time of 911 calls.
"In this event, an unusual set of conditions existed, and included a defect unknown to INdigital," Grady tells Call 6 Investigates' Paris Lewbel. "This delayed the processing of some calls, or gave an ‘all circuits are busy’ network announcement."
The Indiana 911 system was brought back to normal in 51 minutes. State investigators and INdigital immediately launched an investigation into the failure. They and identified a manufacturing defect in a core router.
"This undetected and undocumented issue caused the unexpected behavior of the network on February 15," according to INdigital. "These parts came from an industry leading tech firm. That company did not notify INdigital of the defect."
INdigital says there was no security risk, no systems or information were compromised, and there was nothing hacked.
"The IN911 network has provided continuous service to Indiana since 2005, and has safeguards to make sure 9-1-1 is available and working. It has been reliable, including during many of the critical events that affected other 911 providers," Grady tells RTV6. "INdigital resolved the critical cause and restored service, and identified the underlying cause and took preventive action with a week. We will continue to take every measure possible to refresh, update, and improve the IN911 network as quickly as possible."
