Although everything is running fine now, Vermont's 911 emergency telephone system had a 40-minute outage yesterday due to a "double equipment failure" and a secondary error that ended up taking the entire system down.
Bloomberg Businessweek reports that everyone who called 9-1-1 during the outage has received help and did not suffer any additional consequences from the outage.
The system is hosted by Intrado, of Longmont, Colorado. Intrado Vice President Steve Lowe said in a statement: "Intrado takes our responsiblity to 9-1-1 very seriously, and are working closely with the state of Vermont on this issue."
The traditional 911 system within Vermont has various layers of redundancy to ensure that such outages do not occur, but it appeared that a complete, double equipment failure occurred, and a network error occurred during restoration, causing the entire system to shut down and be unavailable for the 40 minutes, reports CBS Denver News.
There is currently an investigation underway to determine the exact cause of the issues, and to ensure that such a failure does not occur again within the state.