Emergency call systems in at least three states were hit by the widespread CrowdStrike technology outage, although most major U.S. cities avoided problems overnight.

Oregon Experiencing Issues

In Oregon, some 911 centers, hospitals, airports, and public safety and emergency management agencies had major effects, said Erin Zysett, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Emergency Management.

“Our IT teams are working very fast to apply the fixes that CrowdStrike has provided, and those impacts are being mitigated quickly,” she said, adding that statewide alert systems and public safety incident tracking systems were mostly unaffected.

Emergency dispatchers in Portland, Oregon, were forced to work without the help of crucial computer systems for several hours and had to work “manually,” Mila Mimica, a city spokesperson, said in a statement. As of 6 a.m., however, the computer systems were back to working normally.

In Phoenix, the outage affected a computerized 911 dispatch center, Police Department officials said, but the city’s 911 centers were still operating. Dispatchers were still able to field calls, but they had to record communications on paper. The 911 call center was restored by about 6 a.m., Phoenix police said.

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Alaska Problems Started Thursday

In Alaska, problems began to emerge Thursday night. Call centers across the state for many 911 emergency lines stopped working correctly because of “a nationwide technology-related outage,” the Alaska State Troopers said on social media.

Some dispatch centers lost use of their digital call systems and had to switch to analog phones or rely on other dispatch centers that were still functioning, said Austin McDaniel, communications director for the Alaska Department of Public Safety. The problems were fully resolved around 4 a.m. local time, he added.

Emergency service outages have affected services this year. In April, residents had problems calling 911 in parts of Nebraska and Texas, the entire state of South Dakota and Las Vegas. Last month, emergency agencies in Massachusetts scrambled to communicate with the public and directed them to alternative numbers after a firewall unintentionally prevented calls from getting through.

The outage on Friday led to a very busy 16 minutes for the San Francisco Fire Department. Between 2:34 and 2:50 a.m., 20 fire alarms in buildings around the city blared, prompting firefighters to respond to each one. The alarms were all false and apparently caused by the CrowdStrike outage, said Lt. Jonathan Baxter, a department spokesperson.

Agencies in most large cities, however, said on Friday that their emergency communications systems were running as usual. In New York, the 911 system was functioning and emergency response was unaffected, a New York Police Department spokesperson said. Authorities in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Miami also reported that their 911 systems were unaffected.

The outages affected less urgent government operations in some areas of the country. The Department of Motor Vehicles offices in Georgia, Ohio and Indiana said that they had been disrupted or were expecting potential outages. In Hudson, a suburb about 40 minutes south of Cleveland, utility billing and phone systems were down. Hudson closed its City Hall for the day.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Isabella Kwai, Jonathan Wolfe and Jill Cowan
c.2024 The New York Times Company