By Joanna Putman
Police1
WASHINGTON — Police leaders have expressed concerns surrounding a long-lasting Feb. 22 AT&T outage, which also impacted the emergency communications network FirstNet, ABC News reported.
The First Responder Network Authority was signed into U.S. law in 2012, according to the report. It offers an “interoperable network” for public safety run from AT&T’s network, which was down for three hours due to a software update gone wrong.
“The First Responder Network Authority is working with its nationwide network contractor, AT&T, to conduct a thorough assessment of the outage and its impact on public safety operations,” FirstNet Authority said in a statement to ABC News. “Following the outage, AT&T took immediate action to prioritize restoration for public safety users of FirstNet, and service is currently running normally across the FirstNet network.”.
Story County, Iowa, Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald stated that more federal oversight was needed to prevent future FirstNet outages.
“To have this develop -- and it wasn’t just five- or 10-minute outage, as a corrected minor problem -- it was for several hours that AT&T was not working,” Fitzgerald, who helped develop FirstNet, told ABC News. “And that just can’t be done.”
Chief Johnny Jennings of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina said that computers inside patrol cars were down for about an hour, according to the report.
“It’s always a concern when you disrupt anything that puts emergency services in touch with our community and our citizens because sometimes that’s the lifeline that seconds can save lives,” Jennings told ABC News. “And we want to make sure that that we’re always having that open line so that we can be reached whether that’s whether network goes down or whether we’re having people on hold or anything we take that very seriously.”