PSAP chief Joe Vitale (center): Frontier "equipment failure" potentially to blame. By 11:50 a.m. on Tuesday, it was clear: the city’s 911 operators had a problem. When they tried to make calls from the system’s landline phones — whether to check in on a civilian in trouble or connect with another department — they were met with a fast stream of discordant beeps.The Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) phones were still ringing with incoming calls, and texts to 911 were still working. But a monitor showed that every successful caller was using a T‑Mobile- or AT&T‑affiliated cellphone. No landlines and no Verizon Wireless calls were coming through.“We figured out that something wasn’t working. We didn’t even know what was wrong,” said Joe Vitale, the head of the city’s PSAP team.Vitale and his colleagues first had to figure out how to contact others in the city and state for assistance. His office landline couldn’t make calls. ​“We’ve got a communications problem, and how do you make notifications to your partners and your vendors over the phone?” he recalled. His team quickly worked out that at least some cellphones were still functioning, and the department had access to functioning radio communication devices. They reached City Hall, technology vendors, and the state’s emergency services department, and discovered that towns across the state were experiencing the same problem. “We’re making all sorts of notifications and we’re starting to realize that the problem’s bigger than our building,” he said.According to Mayor Justin Elicker, if the city’s 911 system goes temporarily offline, calls get automatically re-routed to PSAPs in other towns. The backup to that backup is the department’s non-emergency line (also operated by PSAP), at 203 – 946-6316. But on Tuesday midday, ​“all of the 911 centers were down,” Elicker said, and the non-emergency line wasn’t working. ​“Which is why we were fortunate that the Yale Police Department call center happened to not be affected by this.”As state officials and telecom carriers worked to identify the problem, the city decided to direct residents to call the Yale Police Department’s direct phone number instead. City PSAP operators physically relocated to the Yale Police call center. The city sent out press releases and circulated instructions on social media with the Yale Police number, 203 – 432-4400. The statewide outage lasted for under three hours, with normal functioning appearing to resume at 2:10 p.m. ​“We’re still getting information,” Vitale said on Wednesday, about what exactly went wrong.During that time, about 130 calls to 911 were able to come through from AT&T and T‑Mobile-affiliated phones, Vitale said. Texts to 911 were also functioning — until right after an alert went out to cellphone users notifying them of the outage, he said. It’s possible, he added, that so many people tried to test out whether texts to 911 would go through that they crashed the system — and he urged the public not to contact 911 through any method unless they are experiencing a true emergency.Elicker reported on Tuesday afternoon that the Yale Police Department received about four emergency calls that would have otherwise gone to 911 — all from other towns. ​“None of them were New Haven-related,” he said. Out-of-towners may have called ​“because we put out pretty broadly that if people had an emergency in New Haven, they should call [that] number.”As of Wednesday morning, Vitale said he does not know of any local emergencies that went unaddressed due to the outage.“In my recollection, we have never had a statewide 911 outage,” said Elicker. ​“There was a nationwide AT&T outage in February that had a minor impact on our operations, but I can’t recall ever having a major incident like this.”“We try to work really quickly to respond, and I’m proud of our team,” he added.According to Vitale, the technical snafu appears to have affected telecom carriers rather than 911 itself. ​“What we believe happened was an equipment failure within Frontier,” he said. (Frontier did not respond to a request for comment; Verizon referred the Independent to the state’s press release.) Vitale noted that his team had difficulty using landline phones or calling landlines from Verizon-affiliated devices that were not connected to PSAP’s technology. Vitale said on Wednesday morning that early indications suggest that there was a problem ​“within the transmission system of getting a call from Point A to Point B.”The state police department referred the Independent to a press release, which stated, ​“The issue was identified to be affecting the ability of customers to complete calls to certain state operated networks as well as 911 emergency lines. The carriers have worked to diagnose and resolve the issue.”The press release indicated that the problem did not seem to be deliberately caused: ​“The outages appear to have been technical in nature at this time and not the result of any form of malicious cyber-based outage.”Going forward, Elicker said he intends to regroup with the state and with other towns to create additional contingency plans in case of another incident like Tuesday’s. That may include ​“having an alternative emergency line with another telecom network, so that we’re not reliant” on one company.The city of New Haven received 165,932 calls in 2023, per state data — significantly more than any other municipality in the state.Vitale, meanwhile, is working on further analyzing data about the calls that were dropped and the calls that did come through, as he puts together an ​“action document” about preventative steps to take.Elicker advised residents to make plans for emergencies that don’t involve calling 911 — not because he necessarily expects outages like these to be a common occurrence, but because cell phones can run out of battery or malfunction when their users may need them most. ​“For example, my family always talks about meeting at a certain place if we’re at a big busy event and we can’t get in touch with each other,” he said.Vitale, meanwhile, urged the public not to call 911 unless they have a true emergency. “Please do not call 911 as a test — whether it be over your phone, or a text to 911 — because that’s what presented some difficulties up here” with the emergency text service, he said.