AT&T users both in Lubbock and across the nation were unable to call 911 for at least an hour last night. Michael Grossie, the Executive Director for the Lubbock Emergency Communication District said as soon as he heard about the outage, he contacted police to get the word out.
“They notified us that there was a system wide outage and calls to 911 could be impacted,” Grossie said. “Both the sheriff’s office and police department listed seven digit numbers for people to call.”
Melissa Orosco, the Communications Coordinator for the Lubbock Police Department, said she saw a posting on social media about a nation wide outage, prompting her to try calling 911 on her personal phone.
“I myself have AT&T so I started calling 911. The first time I called I got a busy signal, so I hung up and called again it rang about 30 times,” said Orosco.
Both Grossie and Orosco said the 911 text line was working for AT&T users during the outage.
“We do have ‘texting to 911’ and that was working, I did do a test on that,” said Orosco.
But Orosco said even though the 911 text option did work last night, they always prefer if you are in an emergency to call and to only text if the call doesn’t go through.
