MARQUETTE, Mich. — The company that operates most of Michigan's 911 system has identified the source of Tuesday’s statewide outage.
According to Peninsula Fiber Network (PFN), the outage occurred around 3:15 p.m. on Tuesday, January 10.
The company says there was an error with its optical transport network, resulting in calls not being completed as expected or calls lacking critical information, including the caller's address.
PFN says its staff set up a call bridge with 911 operators across the state within 20 minutes to troubleshoot the problem and make sure calls were being rerouted while the equipment was being serviced.
“We take our mission-critical role in delivering consistent and reliable service to Michigan’s 911 operators very seriously and build multiple redundancies into our network. We also work with dispatch center managers to ensure processes are in place to reroute calls between centers when unexpected issues occur,” said Peninsula Fiber Network General Manager Scott Randall. “Despite our best preparations, some calls were still disrupted and for that we are deeply sorry. We are now making several upgrades to the whole system to eliminate the possibility of additional network errors in the future.”
The company plans to invest $6 million to redesign its network.
Work will be done over the next several months, but a final completion date has not yet been set.
