Cause of hours-long 911 outage on Oahu remains a mystery to police

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – For about four hours Sunday, if you had an emergency, your cell phone was useless for calling 911.
Mobile phone and television broadcast alerts began at around 2:15 p.m. Sunday via Honolulu’s emergency alert system.
They warned the public that most cell phones were not able to access 911 and offered alternate numbers for emergency.
Now, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi says he wants an explanation about how the crucial technology could fail in “a very dangerous situation.”
“I think the public lives with the fact that they know, should there be an emergency of any kind occur, that they can call 911 and there would be an immediate response,” he said. “That’s kind of under the umbrella of our number-one priority of public safety. So this was a real wild thing for me, I’ll be really candid with you.
“The reality is this is a pretty serious situation and we are going to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Blangiardi said.
Blangiardi told Hawaii News Now, “I got a text from (Honolulu Police) Chief (Joe) Logan actually around one o’clock, and then I heard right away from Jim Ireland, the director of EMS (Emergency Medical Services) that it actually happened about 11 a.m.”
On Monday, the Honolulu Police Department laid out a timeline of the challenge, but offered no theory about why it happened in the first place.
The police communications commander said his team dealt with a cascading series of problems and failed back up systems that began at approximately 10:30 a.m.
“We noticed we’re having some communication problems with our other agencies, which would be the Honolulu Fire Department, EMS (Emergency Medical Services) and Ocean Safety. It started out with Honolulu fire and then gradually we started learning it got worse,” said Capt. Matthew Kurihara, HPD Communications Division.
“We eventually learned that we were not getting 911 calls from the major cell carriers of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon,” Kurihara said.
“Exactly what failed I do not know,” he said. “I believe Hawaiian Tel and the major cell carriers are still looking into that.”
Hawaii News Now contacted Hawaiian Telcom and the other carriers. Hawaiian Tel said they didn’t cause and weren’t impacted by the problem, Verizon said a “third-party issue” affected all carriers and referred questions to HPD.
The communications captain said his staff was scrambling as the usual backups didn’t work.
“Because all the station phones are tied to the same network, that’s why it didn’t work,” Kurihara said. “My direct office line didn’t work. That’s why 911 didn’t work at the substation phones. The district station phones didn’t work.”
Jennifer Walter, acting Director of the Honolulu Emergency Management Agency, which issued the public alerts, said she was informed about the issue at the same time as the mayor, but needed to wait for HPD to supply working alternative numbers, and then determine whether the outage was going to last long enough to make an alert worthwhile.
The system returned to normal a little after 3 p.m. without HPD making any repairs on its own. A half hour later, the public was informed.
But important questions remained for emergency managers, like Walter.
“I think one of the things that we want to know is just making sure one that it wasn’t something that would compromise other communication systems that are going to be vital in an emergency,” she said. “Knowing that would be helpful.”
Walter also wanted to discuss with HPD a protocol for having alternative call numbers to the public more quickly.
Blangiardi said he was frustrated by the lack of information.
“As much as I want to reassure the public during this interview right now, there’s a lot of things I don’t know,” he said.
Capt. Kurihara said he didn’t want to speculate on whether the failure may have been a malicious systems hack.
“Thankfully, as far as I know, we were able to avoid any major catastrophes or incidents and like I said, my staff did a stellar job handling the situation,” he said.

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