Pennsylvania 911 issues resolved as officials investigate what caused intermittent outages
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
All 911 services across the state have been tested and are fully functional after intermittent outages Friday were causing some calls not to go through, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency said.
At this time, 911 services have been restored in Pennsylvania.
— PA Emergency Management Agency (@PEMAHQ) July 12, 2025
An investigation into what caused intermittent outages will continue, and we will update you on that as soon as we can.
We worked with counties to fully test that the system is operational. Please do not call 911…
A statewide emergency alert regarding 911 service hit Pennsylvanians’ cell phones just before 3:30 p.m. Friday, asking residents to reach their local 911 center via their non-emergency numbers if their 911 calls weren’t getting through.
Service began returning to normal Friday evening.
Allegheny County Emergency Services had said after the announcement of the outage that its system was ”100% operational,” but that the statewide issues were intermittently affecting the county phone system.
In an update just after 6 p.m. Friday, PEMA officials said the majority of 911 calls were making their way through the state system, but there may be some issues, such as losing location or phone number data.
“An investigation into what caused intermittent outages will continue, and we will update you on that as soon as we can,” the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency said in a statement Saturday. “We worked with counties to fully test that the system is operational. Please do not call 911 for testing purposes; leave lines open for true emergencies.”
In a Saturday news release, Allegheny County Emergency Services said that, as of midnight, all Allegheny County 911 systems were “stable and fully functional” and that, as of 9:30 a.m., it had “no issues related to yesterday’s statewide intermittent 911 phone system problems.”
“We continue to monitor all systems and communicate with our PEMA and statewide 911 partners regarding the statewide system status and the root cause analysis process.”
PEMA Director Randy Padfield said the outage was not likely caused by a cyberattack or software update.
"It could be a software issue, it could be a hardware issue. What we know is it doesn’t appear to be the result of a software update that was pushed based on our communications” with the service provider,” he said Friday evening.
Mr. Padfield said issues were originally discovered in Delaware County around 2 p.m. Friday, when calls were “intermittently failing to be delivered.” Other counties began reporting intermittent issues shortly after, leading officials to trigger the statewide alert.