A nationwide outage affecting CenturyLink, an Internet communications company, is continuing to impact wireless 911 call capability in various parts of the country. We believe Massachusetts has been impacted by the outage and urge residents using cellular phones, if necessary, to contact emergency first-responders by using the full 10-digit number of a public safety answering point emergency call center (PSAP) or their local police department.
Residents using a cell phone to call for emergency services should first try to dial 911, and if it does not work, instead call one of these four 10-digit numbers:
Nahant Fire 781-581-1234
Nahant Police 781-581-1212.
Residents using cell phones may also, if dialing 911 does not work, may call the 10-digit general number of their local police department. They may also call the 10-digit number of a State Police Barracks in their area (search for barracks location and phone numbers on the MSP web site at www.mass.gov and search for State Police locations).
The outage seems to only be affecting wireless 911 calls; landline calls to 911 appear to be working.
CenturyLink has indicted it is working on repairing what the company called a “network element” that is causing the problem.