COLUMBUS, Ohio — The text-to-911 service has been restored after it was temporarily unavailable to those in Columbus on Thursday, according to the city.
City officials say the Columbus Emergency Communications Center experienced an outage, affecting the ability to receive texts. Those who texted 911 were receiving a bounce-back message.
During the outage, residents were asked to instead call 911 directly in the case of an emergency. The city said it could receive and process calls as normal.
The issue was believed to be a third-party vendor issue.
The service was first introduced in 2019 for situations in which people are unable to call. Using the text-to-911 option, dispatchers can communicate with a person and ask questions and receive clarity without speaking.
