999 emergency number goes offline after fault

The Joint Emergency Services Control Centre first reported that it was experiencing faults with the 999 emergency lines at 9.30am, at which point people were told to instead call police headquarters or one of three mobile numbers.

An hour later, a call divert was put in place while network provider Sure and the States Information Systems and Services team sought to restore the emergency line.

‘The cause of [yesterday] morning’s issues has been determined as the devices which are specifically responsible for the routing of all 999 calls that are made on-island,’ said a States of Guernsey spokesman.

‘These devices operate in a High Availability (HA) mode and are designed so that should one device fail the other one ensures continuity of service. It is rare that both devices should fail at the same time, however in this case that is what happened. Working quickly and efficiently with our partners Sure, the States Information Systems and Services (ISS) team ensured that a technical work around was applied allowing 999 calls to be routed to the Jessc as normal until normal services could be restored.’

Both of the routing devices were repaired, with the full service restored at 3.58pm yesterday afternoon. The spokesman said that only one call had been placed on the 999 number during the outage.

‘Further to that, no calls have been received from anyone stating that they tried and failed to get through during the outage,’ they said. ‘We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the media for quickly relaying the alternative numbers provided, and members of the public who shared our social media posts.’