New York City has identified the cause of a seven-hour failure at its Bronx 911 call center as an early morning software update pushed by Motorola, a disclosure that came a week after the outage and only in response to reporters' questions.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday that the update caused the malfunction and that the city is taking steps to prevent a recurrence, according to NBC New York. The failure ran from about 3:13 a.m. to shortly after 10 a.m. on August 18 at Public Safety Answering Center II in the Bronx, a facility overseen by the mayor's office rather than the NYPD. During that window, callers and call takers could not hear one another. City Hall first confirmed the failure the next day, saying 5,659 calls came into the center and about 1,700 were affected, with up to 400 New Yorkers potentially unable to connect with a call taker at all after accounting for alarm systems and duplicate calls.
