Service restored after widespread 911 outages impacted Mississippi and Louisiana, officials say

By Emma Tucker, CNN

(CNN) — Service has been restored after Louisiana and Mississippi experienced widespread outages of 911 emergency calling systems for several hours Friday afternoon as a result of damage to AT&T fiber optic cables, the carrier and officials said.

The outages impacted multiple parishes in Louisiana including the state’s three largest cities, as well as several Mississippi counties and the capital city of Jackson, according to officials.

Just before 6 p.m. local time, AT&T said services are operating as normal across impacted areas after the issue was resolved.

“We understand how important these services are and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the company told CNN.

A severed fiber cable was cited by officials in both states as the reason for the slew of outages.

New Orleans emergency communications officials said earlier in the afternoon the outages were having a “regional impact.” Mississippi officials were working with AT&T to determine the scope of the outages, said Scott Simmons, director of external affairs at the state’s department of emergency management.

“There was a major fiber cut located in Mississippi that has taken out all of this,” Karl Fasold, Orleans Parish communications director, said during a news conference streamed on WWL-TV. He said there’s no indication or reason to suspect the fiber cuts were malicious.

AT&T teams were dispatched and worked “as quickly as possible to repair multiple fiber cuts” for some customers in both states, the company told CNN in an earlier statement.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves also said services have been restored and the 911 system is “now operating as it should throughout our state.”

Local officials had been advising residents to call alternate numbers while they worked to restore 911 service.

Outages were also reported in Fulton County, Illinois, where officials advised residents to call a non-emergency number, the Canton Police Department said.

Forrest and Kemper were among the counties affected in Mississippi, while in Louisiana, Jefferson and Tangipahoa parishes as well as the cities of Baton Rouge and Shreveport were among those experiencing outages.

Residents calling 911 in Forrest County had to wait on the line until being transferred to the National 911 Call Center, which then had to transfer the call to a non-emergency line in the county — some of which had crashed, Gerry Burns, the Deputy 911 Coordinator of the county, told CNN.

Shreveport police said they were seeing an increase in call volume to their non-emergency dispatch lines since the outage was first reported.

Service in St. Tammany Parish was restored after both their main non-emergency dispatch line and 911 service were down, according to a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.

Tangipahoa authorities told residents needing to call 911 that if they received a busy signal their call would still be logged and they would get a return call “within seconds” from a regular number.

Verizon said in a statement to CNN the outages were “due to a network issue by another carrier,” and landline customers were not impacted.

CNN has reached out to T-Mobile and smaller providers such as Consumer Cellular and Google Fi for comment on the incidents.

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CNN’s Jason Morris, Samantha Delouya and Taylor Galgano contributed to this report.