911 service restored in Pennsylvania; state official says investigation underway

911 service has been restored in Pennsylvania.

Late Friday, 911 calls resumed routing as normal across the state and an investigation into what caused an hours long outage was ongoing, according to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

In a post on social media just before midnight, the agency reported 911 services had been restored.

“Thank you to our staff, county 911 offices and tech experts for working late into the night to restore this critical emergency service to its full capacity,” the agency wrote on social media.

Officials worked with counties across the state to test the system and determine it was fully operational. Intermittent outages statewide on Friday prompted PEMA to issue an alert at 3:24 p.m.

Agency director Randy Padfield said at a news conference around 6 p.m. Friday that technicians and officials were working through the evening to identify and fix the issue.

“It could be a software issue. It could be a hardware issue,” he said. “What we know is that it doesn’t appear to be the result of a software update that was pushed based on our communications with the Next Gen 911 service provider.”

Padfield said he did not know how many calls to 911 had not gone through. Problems were first reported by the Delaware County dispatch center about 3 p.m. and other county centers shortly afterward.

“We understand that this is concerning because people want to have faith in the 911 system,” he said.

He called it an anomaly for the state and its Next Generation system.

Abigail Gardner, spokeswoman for Allegheny County, told TribLive some calls were getting dropped.

During the outage, Allegheny County Emergency Center dispatchers returned calls or automatically dispatched emergency services to the area from which the call came, she said.

Westmoreland County Public Safety Director Roland “Bud” Mertz said the county experienced intermittent outages all day Friday but he does not believe any calls were missed.

Some calls came in to the 911 center and disconnected. Staff immediately reached out to those callers, Mertz said.

Gov. Josh Shapiro said his office was monitoring the situation.

“We are on top of the issue and working to restore full service as quickly as possible,” Shapiro posted on X. “In the meantime, stay calm, follow the directions of PEMA and local authorities, and do not call 911 for any reason other than an emergency. Updates to follow.”

I have been briefed by @PEMAHQ on the intermittent 911 outage currently happening in some parts of Pennsylvania.

We are on top of the issue and working to restore full service as quickly as possible. In the meantime — stay calm, follow the directions of PEMA and local…

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) July 11, 2025