{"id":342731,"date":"2026-09-10T11:08:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T11:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/342731\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T11:08:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T11:08:16","slug":"city-council-grills-officials-on-911-outage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/342731\/","title":{"rendered":"City Council grills officials on 911 outage"},"content":{"rendered":"

The city’s chief technology officer was grilled by City Council members Wednesday over an August 911 outage<\/a> that left nearly 1,700 emergency calls unable to connect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The outage occurred Aug. 18 at the Bronx Public Safety Answering Center, one of the city\u2019s two main 911 call centers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Officials said the problem was caused by Motorola, the city\u2019s service provider, conducting a routine software update the night before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s something to worry about, it\u2019s something to be addressed, it\u2019s something that we need to handle,\u201d said Sean Harrison, of Queens.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chief Technology Officer Lisa Gelobter told Council members that the city first became aware of a problem with incoming calls when call takers at the Bronx center reported they could not hear calls coming from alarm companies at around 6 a.m.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t understand it was affecting 911 calls until about 9:30 in the morning,\u201d Gelobter said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many are now asking why the public was never officially notified by the city about the seven-hour outage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Council Member Oswald Feliz, chair of the Public Safety Committee, said the city should notify the public through media outlets and social media when a major emergency communications system goes down.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMost, if not all, people learned about it through the media, so they didn\u2019t even learn about the outage through the agency, the Office of Technology or any city agency, and that\u2019s beyond concerning,\u201d Feliz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The hearing also revealed that the August outage was not the first 911-related disruption this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a text to 911 outage in May that affected 12 callers,\u201d Gelobter said. \u201cEach of those people were called back. They got a bounce-back message when they tried to text saying, \u2018Please call.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Feliz questioned why the public was not notified about that outage either.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost two hours. That is wild. So there was a two-hour outage, and the public was not notified?\u201d Feliz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Officials said the city is reviewing its procedures for communicating with the public during outages.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we do have to revisit communication procedures across the board, internally as well as externally, and when the public should be notified,\u201d Gelobter said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The hearing also focused on the city\u2019s efforts to monitor the quality of 911 calls. City teams continuously review call recordings to ensure audio quality, but those reviews did not catch the August outage.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The city’s chief technology officer was grilled by City Council members Wednesday over an August 911 outage that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[387,25,9,24,55,54,12,56,1174,308,27,200],"class_list":["post-342731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-app-public-safety","tag-app-top-stories","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-olivia-leach","tag-public-safety","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}