The New York Department of Public Service said Friday it will investigate a network disruption that affected 911 service for more than 400,000 Verizon New York, Inc., and Frontier Communications Corp. customers in the lower Hudson Valley on Thursday for nearly four hours. The commission said it was asked by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D.) to look into the outage. “The public relies on 911 service as a lifeline to ensure they get fast and immediate assistance should any kind of life-threatening or other safety emergency occurs,” said Department Chief Executive Officer Audrey Zibelman, in a statement. “The DPS investigation will seek to determine the root cause of the outage and other underlying facts in an effort to understand how this occurred and help prevent future outages.”

The DPS said its investigation will evaluate why back-up systems designed to ensure continued service operations failed, and what improvements might be needed. The goal of the review is prevent and mitigate future outages, and the investigation is expected to take two months, according to the department.

The Nov. 12 outage potentially affected more than 400,000 Verizon customers in Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, and Ulster counties and prevented residents of these counties from contacting 911 in the event of an emergency. The Verizon outage began at 2:30 p.m., with services gradually being restored starting at 5:30 p.m., and with full restoration occurring by 6:45 p.m., according to the DPS.

Meanwhile, the Frontier outage affected the Hamlet of Roscoe in Sullivan County and impacted more than 900 customers. The outage initially began in the early afternoon with intermittent service, but had become a complete outage by evening. Full service was restored by midnight. Both companies responded to the service problems, and worked with emergency services agencies. DPS said its staff monitored company restoration efforts. – Carrie DeLeon, carrie.deleon@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily