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Microsoft downplayed the possibility that an outage that knocked several of its services offline on Monday night contributed to widespread interruptions in 911 emergency calls service that occurred at approximately the same time.
Police departments in states across the country, including Minnesota, Delaware, Arizona, Indiana, Colorado and others, reported that 911 hotlines were offline on Monday night. The issues occurred as Microsoft contended with an outage impacting Office 365, Outlook, its Azure cloud services and other products.
“We’ve seen no indication that the multi-state 911 outage was a result of yesterday’s Azure service interruption,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Fox News on Tuesday.
Some police departments may have experienced interruptions to their Microsoft Teams or Skype services, the spokesperson added. Microsoft’s issues had mostly resolved as of Tuesday afternoon.
The exact cause of the 911 service interruption was not immediately clear.
The 911 outages drew immediate scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission, the agency responsible for regulating communications services. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel called for the situation to be investigated.
“The one system we need to work all the time is 911,” Rosenworcel wrote on Twitter. “The FCC needs to get to the bottom of this now and figure out what is going on.”
The 911 outage appeared to resolve itself within minutes in many locations, while other departments experienced longer delays. Residents were informed to use text services or call alternate hotlines in case of an emergency.
"Delaware State Police Dispatch Centers are now operational and 911 calls are being received," Delaware State Police said in a statement. "If you call 911 and receive a busy signal or recorded message, callers are encouraged to text 911 and type your emergency in the message field or utilize the non-emergency telephone numbers."
Earlier Monday evening, the city of Redmond, Washington noted city phone lines and email accounts were down due to the Microsoft 365 outage. Microsoft's headquarters are located in Redmond.
This story has been updated.
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