Abreu questions May text outage impact on deaf and hard-of-hearing callers
Majority Leader Abreu asks about the May text-to-911 outage and what happened if affected individuals were deaf or hard of hearing. Barbera explains TTY was still available on voice services, and translation apps calling through national 911 were also available. Abreu asks about those who needed to be quiet for safety.
Go ahead.
Thank you, Chair.
I want to return to the texting outage.
You testified that those individuals were told to call.
What if they were deaf or hard of hearing?
I will let my colleague, DC Barbera, address that.
During that time when the public was receiving what's called a bounce-back message, notifying them that text to 911 was unavailable and to call 911,
they would have other options for that community.
TTY was still available on voice services, as well as the deaf and hard of hearing community using translation apps that call in through national 911 into the city's 911 system.
So there are multiple avenues available for that community.
And what if these individuals were in a position where their safety required them to be quiet and couldn't make phone calls?
Yeah, during the time of the incident, due to the performance problem that was being experienced,
the service, we activated the bounce back message so that the public would know that there was a chance that their text would not be processed.
This was the best option.
To ensure that calls would not be lost or people believing that they were actually waiting for help that wasn't going to arrive.
So a strategic decision was made to enable the bounce back message for the public to understand that the service was unavailable.
Do you know how many?