Officials investigating cause of DC 911 system outage

District of Columbia officials are investigating an outage that affected the city’s 911 system overnight for about 90 minutes.

Media outlets report that the system was down between 11:35 p.m. Saturday and around 1 a.m. Sunday.

Chris Geldart is director of the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. He said Sunday that the outage was caused by an equipment failure inside the system. He says officials are investigating why it failed.

Officials say they’re not sure how many calls were missed. They say typically between 300 and 500 calls are received during the time the outage lasted.

During the outage, callers were directed to use two 10-digit numbers for D.C. police and firefighters as a backup. Officials said those numbers received 40 calls during the outage.