A 911 outage in Clark County and most of Washington state resulted in a push alert to startled Oregonians.
The Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency (CRESA) alert, sent out late Thursday, was cryptic to those outside Washington state.
It read "Emergency Alert This is CRESA 911. 911 lines are down in our area. call 360-693-3111 for emergencies."
CRESA announced at 7:45 Friday morning that 911 service has been restored.
KGW viewers in Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Columbia counties said they received the unexpected alert between 11 p.m. and midnight. The alerts were sent to cellphone users as far east as the The Dalles and as far south as Salem.
KGW reporter Lindsay Nadrich said her work cellphone, based in Oregon, received the alert. Her personal cellphone with a Washington area code and all alerts enabled, got nothing.
The message prompted Lake Oswego police to quickly send out a cautionary tweet that the Clark County alert did not affect residents in that city.
CRESA issued the following statement Friday morning.
"Around 80% of our calls come in via mobile devices. We had reports from first responders in the field that individuals were unaware and did not know how to reach 9-1-1. After pushing the information to all other methods we chose to send the message via EAS (Emergency Alert System) and WEA (Wireless Emergency Alerts) to ensure everyone was aware of the outage. Those systems allow us to hit everyone at one time. Because of the shared media market with the Portland Metro region, everyone got these notifications. While we can somewhat tailor the range of these alerts, due to our close proximity to Oregon there was some bleed over into that area."
Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency announced the outage a little after 8:30 p.m. after some residents were not able to reach the center.
Residents can contact the center for any emergency by calling 360-693-3111, 311 or text 911.
In Cowlitz County, residents unable to reach 911 are asked to call 360-577-3098.
The nationwide outage began early in the day but by late Thursday night, the company tweeted that its engineers had identified a “network element” that was affecting services and expected to fully restore services within hours.
Monroe, Louisiana-based CenturyLink didn’t provide details of the problem and it didn’t indicate how many customers were affected. Customers from New York to California reported outages.
Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, said via Twitter it was a nationwide outage and her agency needed to investigate.
In Idaho, the internet problems caused the temporary shutdown of phone services at the Idaho Department of Correction and the state’s Department of Education, The Idaho Statesman reported .
Some ATM machines weren’t working in Idaho and Montana.
At North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, Colorado, doctors and nurses for a time had difficulty accessing patient records. Rather than using digital devices, they had to take notes with pencil and paper, according to the Greeley Tribune .
WyoLotto officials said they would postpone announcing Wyoming’s winning state lottery numbers and winnings for the day until after the outage was over.
Verizon said it had service interruptions in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and parts of Montana as a result of issues with CenturyLink. Verizon said CenturyLink helps handle wireless network data traffic for Verizon and other wireless providers.