Las Vegas police 911 system suffers brief outage

For 31 minutes early Wednesday, the largest law enforcement agency in Nevada could not accept 911 calls.

A “system disruption” to the Metropolitan Police Department’s call center began at 4:19 a.m. and lasted until 4:50 a.m., department spokesman Aden Ocampo-Gomez said.

During that period, all of Metro’s emergency calls instead were answered by Henderson and North Las Vegas call takers, Ocampo-Gomez said. Any time Metro’s call center experiences an outage, all emergency calls automatically are rerouted to Henderson and North Las Vegas under system protocol.

It’s unclear how many Metro 911 and 311 calls were placed during the outage. But Ocampo-Gomez said anyone who placed an emergency call from within Metro’s jurisdiction during that time should not have experienced an abnormal delay.

That’s because Metro patrol dispatchers were looped in as Henderson and North Las Vegas call takers received Metro emergency calls. So as calls came in, Metro dispatchers were able to generate and assign Metro officers to calls for service.

“That’s how the system is designed,” Ocampo-Gomez said.

The outage was caused by an unknown mechanical issue, which happened as a group of technicians were working on a system update.

“The people that were working on it were there, so they were able to fix it,” Ocampo-Gomez said.

Metro is investigating what kind of mechanical issue caused the outage, he said.

Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.