911 outage: Tech glitch caused system in southern Palm Beach County to go offline for one hour

WEST PALM BEACH — Palm Beach County emergency officials are working to determine the cause of a disruption to 911 emergency services in the southern part of the county last week.

An issue with the AT&T network disrupted 911 services for the cities of Boca Raton, Delray Beach and Boynton Beach and the town of Ocean Ridge for about an hour, Dan Koenig, the county's Senior Manager for 911 Program Services, said Thursday.

Service was restored to those areas, which have a combined population of more than 240,000 people, at about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.

"9-1-1 Service in Palm Beach County is operating normally following an issue yesterday afternoon with our vendor. We have been in contact with them as they investigate the root cause," a statement issued by an AT&T spokesperson Thursday evening said.

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It was not immediately clear how many calls were affected. During the outage, Boca Raton police posted notices instructing residents to call the department's non-emergency line.

Koenig noted that there were also outages to the 911 system in the South Carolina counties of Spartanburg and Cherokee at about the same time Wednesday evening. A post on the Spartanburg 911 Facebook page indicated that the outage was caused by a weather-related incident.

Koenig said Palm Beach County is working with AT&T to determine what caused the outage.

"Obviously we will do everything that we can to make sure that it does not occur again," he said.

Julius Whigham II is a criminal justice and public safety reporter for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach him at jwhigham@pbpost.com and follow him on Twitter at @JuliusWhigham. Help support our work: Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: 911 outage in southern Palm Beach County stemmed from tech glitch