911 outage caused by Hawaiian Telcom equipment issue

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Hawaiian Telcom confirmed Wednesday that equipment failure caused Sunday’s 911 outage on Oahu.
Most cell phones were blocked from reaching police dispatchers for about four hours.
Honolulu Chief of Police Joe Logan told the police commission Wednesday the failure was likely due to a problem with Hawaiian Telcom’s main line to the Alapai facility.
But he still hasn’t been told what broke, or if it could break again.
“I think we still need some information from external resources on what happened, and where was the issue, concern, or problem,” he said. “Whatever didn’t work or failed, what is that? So I think we’re still working through that. We’re still waiting for answers on that.”
Police commissioner Laurie Foster said, “I just hope that we are on it, which is not assuming that or making sure that answer is gotten, because we’re getting the brunt of it, the citizens.”
Deputy Chief Rade Vanic said, “There wasn’t anything in our system that our personnel did that caused it to go down. We know that for sure.”
Hawaiian Telcom told us its equipment problem affected the routing of mobile phone calls from major carriers, but its own subscribers used an alternate route that other carriers have not requested.
Hawaiian Telcom said in a statement:
On Sunday, November 17, some Hawaiian Telcom customers experienced intermittent issues with placing or receiving calls between 10:15 a.m. and 2:45 p.m. due to a problem with equipment on O‘ahu. Upon further investigation, it was determined that this equipment issue also affected calls made by some wireless customers when routed through this equipment.
Despite this issue, Hawaiian Telcom’s landline calls to 911 were successfully delivered because our network is designed with an alternate route to the statewide 911 system, which was fully operational during this voice outage.
While alternate routing is available to interconnected carriers (eg wireless and other landline providers), not all carriers request this option.
Meanwhile, Hawaii County Police sent out a warning message Wednesday about a possible service outage in West Hawaii as Hawaiian Telcom conducts scheduled maintenance. The work is set to begin at 11:59 p.m. Thursday and will last for about an hour.
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