HENNEPIN COUNTY, Minn. — Hennepin County 911 phone lines are back in service after a brief outage on Tuesday morning.
Several metro police departments, including Maple Grove, Crystal and Hopkins, tweeted just before 10:15 a.m. that 911 lines were restored.
The outage lasted for about 40 minutes.
According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, the issue in Hennepin County was not an outage of the state's 911 network, but a loss of phone connectivity. A vendor was working on updating equipment at the Hennepin County 911 dispatch center, which led to the outage, DPS said.
In the event of a 911 outage, there are several ways you can get help in an emergency. First, see if your county has a 10-digit, 24-hour emergency number. If you can't get through to 911, try calling that number instead.
Try Text-to-911, an alternative to calling 911 in an emergency. Texting should ONLY be used when individuals are unable to make a voice call.
If you're with someone in the event of an emergency and they have a different cell phone carrier, try calling 911 on their device instead. The same goes if you can get to a landline phone.
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