Emergency calls to 9-1-1 are directly reaching the SunComm center that serves several first responder agencies in Yakima County, but additional testing is being conducted to ensure intermittent outages experienced early this morning after a major outage occurred last night are completely resolved.
If an outage occurs again, or if anyone calling 9-1-1 gets a busy signal, people served by SunComm are directed to report emergencies by calling 509-457-0207.
On Thursday evening, a significant outage that originated with CenturyLink resulted in SunComm switching to a backup phone number. Emergencies could also be reported during the outage by texting 9-1-1.
The outage affected 9-1-1 calling capabilities in multiple western states as well as other internet-based services in several areas of the U.S. At about 9:45 pm on Thursday, CenturyLink posted on its Twitter feed that, “CenturyLink engineers have identified a network element that was impacting customer services and are addressing the issue in order to fully restore services.”
Additional information will be provided if it becomes available.