Multiple states across the U.S. are experiencing significant 911 outages Friday — even after officials said the hotline would be fixed Thursday night.Officials in Washington, Texas, Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Idaho, New Mexico, Missouri, Arizona, and Colorado disclosed cutoffs of their 911 call centers tied to network issues at CenturyLink, the internet company. Hospital access to medical records has also been impacted by the internet blackout.The outages began at around 12 p.m. E.T. Thursday, and the company started working to resolve the issue shortly afterward, according to the CenturyLink status page. The company estimated service would be restored by 1 a.m. Friday, but new issues cropped up and the original issues persisted.“CenturyLink engineers have identified a network element that was impacting customer services and are addressing the issue in order to fully restore services,” the company tweeted Thursday night. “We estimate services will be fully restored within 4 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers.”Verizon also experienced some shortages due to the CenturyLink debacle. The company thought technicians could fix the issue in 4 hours, but according to CenturyLink, not all services have been restored yet.“We are seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete,” a CenturyLink status update posted at 11:01 a.m. ET on Friday. “Our teams are continuing their efforts to resolve these issues and we will continue to provide updates throughout the day.”Cover image: (Press Association via AP Images)
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