Who is behind Monday’s 14-state 911 outage? – Crabs on security


Emergency 911 systems were down for more than an hour Monday in towns and cities in 14 U.S. states. The outage led many news outlets to speculate that the problem was related Micro .ftNo. Sapphire Web service platform, which was also struggling with widespread outage at the time. However, multiple sources tell Krebs SN Security that the 911 issues arose through some sort of technical sniff. Intrado And Lumen, The two companies that handle 911 together, make calls for comprehensive healthcare in the United States.

Image: West.com

On Monday afternoon, September 28, there were 911 in various cities and areas in many states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington Washington. .

Multiple news reports suggest that the outage may be related to service disruptions running in micro .ft. But a software software giant spokesman told Krebs ec Security that “we see no indication that the multi-state 911 outage was the result of yesterday’s Azure service disruption.”

Inquiries with emergency dispatch centers in many cities and towns plagued by 911 outages drew attention to a different source: Omaha, NAB-based intrado – until last year Waste Safety Communications – 911 and Emergency Communications Infrastructure, providing services and services to telecommunications companies and public safety agencies across the country.

Intrado did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But according to Henderson County, NC officials who experienced its own 911 failure yesterday, Intrado said the outage was the result of an unspecified service provider problem.

“On September 28, 2020, at 4:30 p.m., our 911 service provider monitored the internal conditions of their network, which resulted in an impact on 911 call delivery,” an intrado provided to county officials read a statement. “The effect was reduced, and the service was restored and installed and confirmed to be operational by 5:47 PM MT. Our service provider is currently working to determine the root cause. “

Intrado’s statement features the reference service provider Lumen, a communications firm and 911 provider that was recently identified. Centurilink Inc.. A look at the company’s status page shows that multiple lumen systems, including its private and internal cloud networks and its control systems network, experienced total or partial service disruptions on Monday.

Lumen’s status page indicates that there is an outage or service interruption in the company’s private and internal cloud and control system network on Monday.

In a statement to Krebs on Security, Lumen blamed the issue on Intrado.

At around 4:30 p.m., some Lumen customers were affected by the seller partner event, which affected 911 services in AZ, CO, NC, ND, MN, SD and UT, the statement said. “The service was restored in less than an hour and at this point all 911 traffic is being routed properly. The seller partner is preparing to investigate the incident. ”

It is no accident that these two companies are now operating under new names, as this will be the first time that it has rarely been the first time that a large number of Americans have been disrupted between the two.

In 2019, Intrado / West and Centurilink agreed to pay 75 575,000 to settle the investigation Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the August August 2018 outage, which lasted 65 minutes. The FCC discovered that the incident was the result of a waste safety technician who changed the configuration of the company’s 911 routing network.

On April 6, 2014, nearly 11 million people in the United States were disconnected from 911 services for eight hours due to a “completely preventable” software software error connected to Intrado’s systems. The incident affected call1 call dispatch centers, and emergency services are essential in Washington and parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, California, Minnesota and Florida.

According to the 2014 Washington Post story on the FCC’s subsequent investigation and report, Intrado’s automated system is involved in the problem by assigning a unique identification code to each incoming call before passing it to the appropriate “public safety answering point”. ., ”Or PSAP.

“On April 9, the software responsible for assigning the code exceeded the pre-determined limit,” the post explains. “The counter literally stopped counting on 40 million calls. As a result, the routing system stopped accepting new calls, leading to failures and a series of failures elsewhere in the 911 infrastructure. “

Given the length of the 2014 outage, the FCC found that the intrado servers responsible for classifying and monitoring service interruptions classified them as “low-level” events that were never flagged for human manual review.

The FCC eventually fined Intrado and Centurilink .4 17.4 million for the multi-state 2014 outage. An FCC spokesman declined to comment on Monday’s outage, but said the agency was investigating the incident.

Tags: 911 Outage, Azure, Centurilink, FCC, Federal Communications Commission, Intrado, Micros rosoft ft, The Washington Post, West Corporation

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