911 power outage impacts DC Police for nearly two hours
WASHINGTON - DC Police were impacted by a 911 outage from Saturday night into early Sunday morning.
The outage began around 11:30 p.m. and ended just after 1 a.m., resulting in callers being unable to get through or being put on indefinite holds.
Officials say the power problem that caused the outage isn't common, and they aren't sure why it happened.
"As the power comes into the facility it goes to a number of different boxes that route the power to our systems, those boxes all went down at the same time," said Chris Geldart, director of DC Homeland Security.
While the boxes were down, callers had to call a ten-digit number, but officials still believe some calls were likely missed.
"Right now we don't have an accurate count of how many calls we missed," said Karima Holmes, director of the Office of Unified Commands.
Geldart says the cause of the outage appears to be a malfunction, rather than hack or attack.
"We are able to rule out the possibility of nefarious activities or some type of hack into our system," he said.