Pepper Fisher

PORT ANGELES – What caused Thursday afternoon’s statewide 911 crash, which lasted about an hour, is still being investigated. We reached out to the local expert on the subject to find out what they know so far about the cause of the outage. Karl Hatton is Deputy Director of the Port Angeles Police Department and he runs PenCom 911.

“We, at this time, don’t know the cause of the 911 outage. We know that our state 9 1 1 office, along with the carriers that transport the 911 data, are all looking into the outage to try to find out the root cause. I suspect somebody probably already knows what caused the outage, but for them to go through all the bits and pieces and then to share that information out to all of the users will take some time.”

Hatton said it did not look like the outage affected any systems other than Washington state. We addressed the elephant in the room and asked him if there was any evidence pointing to a cyber-attack.

“You know, I would say it’s definitely too early to speculate. But all the information we have so far does not indicate it was any kind of malicious act, that it was very likely either some sort of human error or other computer…because a lot of its based on computers and networking. And so there was potentially some sort of error there, but it doesn’t, no one’s saying anything about it looking like a an external attack of any kind.”

Hatton says, what did work well, were the systems set up for this kind of breakdown. He says the 911 centers in every county in the state were immediately in touch with one another via conference call sharing data and coordinating their response.