Feliz questions why public was not notified about August outage
Feliz asks if OTI planned to notify the public and when. Gelobter explains there was a 45-minute window between learning 911 calls were affected (9:30 a.m.) and remediation (10:19 a.m.), with 70% of calls still successful. She says the focus was on fixing the issue, and public notification might have deterred people from calling 911.
Was OTI planning to tell the public about it?
And if yes, when?
Thank you for that question.
I think it is a great one.
And again, we are also going to analyze and revisit all communication procedures and processes going forward.
In this particular case, in terms of notifying the public, we became aware that New Yorkers, public New Yorkers, were impacted for 911 calls at 9.30 approximately, 9.30 a.m., and we were able to have the issue
resolved, remediated by 10.19 a.m.
So there's about a 45-minute period where we knew that 911 callers were being impacted to the time that they were no longer feeling an impact.
During that time period, don't forget, 70% of the calls were being successfully answered and handled without issue.
So from 9.30 to about 9.50, first we had to identify the source system so that we could identify what the issues were.
So this is one of the challenges around debugging the system and actually identifying the source of the issue.
Is that there are many systems, the issues may appear to be intermittent because 70% of the calls were being successful, and so just trying to understand all of that.
And then we did the cutover, and that took about 25 minutes.
And so had it gone on longer and that we weren't able to remediate it so quickly, we
May have revisited the question about answering the public, but we didn't want to deter people from calling 911.
All right, and a few more questions.