911 service crashed across at least three states Wednesday evening.
Several municipalities in Nevada and Nebraska — and the entire state of South Dakota — reported emergency outages.
The service seemingly dropped at the same time, with Las Vegas police first reporting that 911 calls weren’t making it through to dispatchers.
“Dial 911 on a mobile device, and we will be able to see your number and will call you back right away,” the Las Vegas Metro Police Department said at 7:30 p.m. local time.
“911 calls from landlines are NOT working at the moment.”
The roughly 656,000 residents of Las Vegas were urged instead to text 911, a portion of the service that wasn’t interrupted.
The nearby city of Henderson reported the same outages, but like Las Vegas, was unable to provide a timeframe for the service to be reinstated.
In Nebraska, the Buffalo County and City of Kearney Emergency Call Center also reported outages but didn’t specify the extent of the interrupted service, instead asking those in need to dial alternate, non-emergency numbers.
South Dakota was the only one of the three states to confirm that the outages affected the entire state — meaning nearly 910,000 people there were without the ability to call 911 Wednesday night.
The Rapid City Police Department emphasized that calls to 911 affected every South Dakotan — and warned people to stop testing whether their call would go through.
“Pennington County 911 is getting inundated with 911 calls from residents who are ‘testing the system.’ While the calls themselves aren’t connecting, dispatchers can still see who is attempting to call and the phone number from the caller,” police said.
“Each 911 attempt is getting a call-back from dispatch, however the workload generated from unnecessary calls is hampering their efforts to get appropriate resources where they need to go.
“PLEASE DON’T CALL 911 UNLESS AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY EXISTS.”
The cause of the widespread outages — and why the three states were the only ones affected — was not clear Wednesday.
South Dakota is linked to Nebraska by its southern border, but Nevada is roughly 1,000 miles away from either.
