911 system back up and running in Manatee, other counties after widespread outage

The Manatee County 911 system was down on Wednesday morning for nearly three hours after experiencing technical issues due to a large wireless outage that affected seven counties, according to public safety officials.

The county’s system was reported down around 10 a.m. and was back up and running by about 12:45 p.m., a senior dispatcher at the emergency operations center said. During the outage, dispatchers said they received multiple calls through the backup line, (941)-301-2270. People were also able to report an emergency by texting 911 from their cell phones.

But as of 1 p.m., the Bradenton Police Department still reported that its system was down. City residents can call one of the following numbers in case of an emergency:

941-932-9301

941-932-9302

The emergency lines that were offline included Sarasota County as well as most of the Tampa Bay area, including agencies in Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties. Affected agencies included the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, North Port Police Department, Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, Tampa Police Department, Tampa Fire Rescue, Tampa International Airport and more.

Hillsborough County and St. Petersburg said their 911 systems were restored around 1 p.m. The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office and Sarasota Police Department said they started receiving calls by about 1:15 p.m. While the service was down in Sarasota County, residents had several phone numbers to call to report an emergency.

The outage involved multiple services that included AT&T, Verizon and Frontier. Sarasota officials said they have been told by Frontier that the outage extended from Spring Hill to Punta Gorda, affecting more than 200,000 customers.

This story was originally published January 31, 2018 at 11:16 AM with the headline "911 system back up and running in Manatee, other counties after widespread outage."