911 Services Restored After National Outage Hit Washington County

WASHINGTON COUNTY, MN — Some Washington County residents experienced issues while trying to call 911 Wednesday night into Thursday after T-Mobile/Sprint had a widespread outage.

The Washington County Sheriff’s Office retweeted a message early Thursday morning that said local law enforcement agencies were having difficulties with 911 callers using T-Mobile, Sprint and Boost Mobile phones.

Those issues were resolved later Thursday morning, a Washington County spokesperson told Patch.

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The Washington County 911 Communications Center was just one of many dispatch centers that experienced problems Wednesday into Thursday.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office posted at 2:23 a.m. Thursday that T-Mobile’s network experienced a “911 outage” that affected its users, as well as those with service from Sprint and Boost Mobile.

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Calls made to 911 from T-Mobile’s network got “stuck in a recorded message loop” and were never directed to any “PSAP,” a public safety answering point, the sheriff’s office said.

Officials warned the outage “could take many hours” and urged people not to “test call” 911, which would tie up phone lines.

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The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office said at 4:45 a.m. Thursday that T-Mobile’s 911 services were working again.

T-Mobile was fined $19.5 million last year by the Federal Communications Commission for a 911 outage in June 2020. That outage lasted for more than 12 hours and caused more than 23,000 911 calls to fail, the FCC said.

Washington County residents who cannot reach 911 can call the sheriff’s 24-hour non-emergency dispatch center at 651-439-9381.

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