Oakland 911 Service Restored After Outage Blamed on Cut Fiber and Copper Lines

Oakland's 911 system is working again after an outage that police are treating as a possible crime, city officials said. Phone service came back Friday morning, following repairs that city and AT&T crews carried out overnight.

The disruption began Wednesday at 8:30 p.m., when fiber-optic and copper lines were damaged and the emergency system went offline. The city said its computer dispatch systems were repaired Thursday afternoon, and 911 service was running by Friday morning.

While the system was down, emergency calls intended for the Oakland Police Department were rerouted to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office dispatch center and to Oakland's fire dispatch center. Oakland police dispatchers sat alongside county dispatchers and handled the calls that concerned Oakland. Because call capacity was limited, those dispatchers responded only to Priority 1 calls.

Alameda County Sheriff's Sgt. Roberto Morales said no delays had been reported as a result of the disruption. The city's OAK311 lines were also affected, but they were working again as of Friday, officials said.

At a Thursday afternoon press conference, Oakland Police Chief James Beere said the department has two fallback systems, but both were compromised during the outage. Beere stressed that a disruption of this scale is not normal.

Councilwoman Charlene Wang, who chairs the Oakland Public Safety Committee, called for stronger protection of the city's systems. "We really need to ensure that the security of our systems are in place," Wang said. She said she was glad a backup plan existed but wanted assurance that such an outage would not recur. Many constituents rely on the non-emergency line, she noted, and officials will need to check whether 911 response times were delayed.

Investigators are following leads to determine whether the lines were intentionally tampered with. AT&T said in a statement that the damage to its network was caused by "theft and vandalism," including cuts to fiber and copper wire.

A similar problem was reported in Morgan Hill, where police said their non-emergency phone lines went down Thursday at about 1 p.m. because someone cut copper cables, which affected Verizon service. Morgan Hill police said their 911 emergency lines stayed fully operational.

The reporting draws on information from Oakland police, AT&T, Councilwoman Wang and the Alameda County Sheriff's Office.