This week Massachusetts faced a statewide outage of the 911 emergency response system, caused by an errant firewall.

The firewall prevented calls from actually going through to the 911 dispatch centers. The Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security described the issue as being “technical” in nature. The 911 vendor Comtech relayed that the technical issue was a result of a firewall installed to protect the system against cyberattacks. While the calls did not go through successfully, the dispatch centers did receive the phone number and caller ID of those calling and were able to return those calls. According to the department, they did not receive any emergent reports impacted by the call service interruption. According to the state 911 department, the phone call outage began at 1:15 PM Tuesday and lasted until 3:15 PM.

Read more:

https://www.securityweek.com/massachusetts-911-outage-caused-by-errant-firewall/