Chair De La Rosa recounts history of 911 system outages
De La Rosa notes this was not an isolated incident, citing three Fire CAD outages and three EMS CAD outages in 2022, a human error disruption that October, and 2025 staffing shortages causing 911 callers to hear recorded hold messages. She emphasizes 911 is not an ordinary computer system.
We need to fix it yesterday.
On August 18, New Yorkers lost not seconds, but hours.
The system was fixed seven hours later.
Sadly, this was not an isolated warning.
In 2022, the council heard that fire CAD experienced three unexpected outages, while EMS CAD experienced three outages.
That October, human error caused another major disruption to FDNY's emergency dispatch system.
And more recently, in 2025, staffing shortages have caused some 911 callers to hear a recorded message telling them to hold because every operator is busy.