Emergency services on the 911 telephone call line were restored late on Wednesday in parts of the United States, officials said, following a widespread outage across all of South Dakota and in parts of Nebraska, Nevada and Texas. Officials in South Dakota, Nevada and Las Vegas said 911 services had been restored, but without identifying the cause of the failure.
The Department of Homeland Security has warned of increased risks of cyber attacks on 911 services as they have migrated to digital systems based on Internet Protocol standards, Reuters reports. Several cyberattacks targeting 911 systems have taken down the services in recent years, one of which, in 2017, paralyzed 911 centers in more than a dozen states.