New York City lawmakers on Wednesday grilled the leader of a city technology agency at the center of a 911 system outage that prevented hundreds of callers from reaching operators, and was not disclosed for hours.
Lisa Gelobter, the chief of the city’s Office of Information and Technology, which oversees the technology behind the 911 system, withstood more than three hours of criticism during a City Council hearing about the partial breakdown on Aug. 18.
The glitch, caused by a software update, prevented nearly 1,700 calls from reaching a 911 call center in the Bronx, one of the two public safety answering centers in the city.
The system was down for seven hours and was back on line by midmorning on Aug. 18. But the agency did not disclose what happened until late that evening, when The New York Times reported it.
When asked at the hearing why the office did not immediately notify New Yorkers about the outage, Ms. Gelobter said agency officials “didn’t want to deter people from calling 911.”
Ms. Gelobter also said the agency did not tell officials at the Police Department or the Fire Department, which handle all 911 calls, that there would be a software update that night that could affect the system.
She said that, at 6 a.m. on Aug. 18, a 911 operator told a supervisor that alarm companies using the system were unable to reach the Bronx call center. By 8:30 that morning, both the police and fire departments had told agency officials that the alarm companies could not get through to the call center, she said. By 9:50 a.m., the agency realized that people making 911 calls also were not getting through, but it never put out a public alert.
Those acknowledgments infuriated Joann Ariola, a council member representing parts of Queens.
“You should be embarrassed,” Ms. Ariola said. “People could have died because you were not doing your job.”
Ms. Gelobter said that an internal review had so far not “identified any death or injury attributable to the disruption,” and that the agency was conducting a “root cause analysis” of the outage.
The breakdown occurred between 3:13 a.m. and 10:19 a.m., Ms. Gelobter said, during which there were nearly 5,500 calls to emergency services. About 3,800 of those calls got through to operators.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked during a news conference late last month why the city did not inform New Yorkers about the breakdown.
“Our first order of business when being alerted as to the issue with the call system was to resolve the call system, and that was the focus,” he replied.
On Wednesday, Oswald Feliz, a Bronx City Council member and the chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said city officials should immediately disclose when outages happen.
“Pretending that they’re not happening, that is just unacceptable, and it is outrageous, and it is not how good government works,” he said.
The software update was performed by Motorola, a vendor that provides technology to operate the system. Council members blamed Motorola for the outages and asked why the company had not sent a representative to the hearing.
Motorola has not returned repeated requests for comment about the breakdown, nor did it respond to a request for comment about its absence on Wednesday.
Shahana Hanif, a council member who represents parts of Brooklyn, asked how the city plans “to address the distrust in the 911 system” caused by the outage.
“This is obviously a critical service, and New Yorkers need to be able to trust that they can call 911,” Ms. Gelobter said. “We need to restore that trust. We need to make sure that this type of issue does not reoccur.” She did not outline specific next steps.
Gale Brewer, a Manhattan council member, asked Richard Napolitano, an assistant chief in the Police Department, how officials planned to thank the 911 operator who alerted supervisors to the problem.
He replied that the operator would be getting a “commander’s day” — department parlance for a day off.
Sally Goldenberg contributed reporting.
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