911 System Goes Down In Oakland For Unknown Reasons

Oakland's 911 call system went down Wednesday night, and calls continue to be rerouted to Alameda County dispatch until the problem can be resolved.

On Wednesday night around 8:30 pm, dispatchers at the Oakland Police Department reported that the Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system had frozen and was displaying an error message, and calls were no longer coming through. As KPIX reports, the outage continued for about 75 minutes, at which point calls were rerouted to Alameda County Sheriff's Office dispatchers, around 9:45 pm.

That rerouting of calls continues into Thursday, and Oakland Police Chief James Beere explained on social media that "OPD dispatchers have been relocated to the Oakland Fire Dispatch Center and the Alameda County Sheriff’s dispatch center."

Beere added, "We are responding only to Priority One calls. The City of Oakland’s IT department is working with AT&T to restore internet and phone services."

Reportedly, OAK311 lines have been impacted by the same issue, and callers with major infrastructure or flooding emergencies are being told to call 911. Otherwise, non-emergency requests are being accepted via email, at [email protected].

No estimated time has been provided for the outage to be resolved, and it remains unclear what caused the system to crash.

Oakland's 911 dispatch system got its first upgrade in 20 years in 2024, as Oaklandside reported, The upgrade was to a Motorola system called PremiereOne, but it's unclear how that is related to the CAD system mentioned in the outage announcement. Prior to the upgrade, there were citywide complaints about how long it took for 911 calls to be answered, and after the upgrade data was showing that about half of all calls were being answered within 15 seconds. The state standard is that 90% of calls should be answered in that timeframe, as KRON4 reported.