Pasadena Police 911 System Suffers Glitch, Goes Offline Friday Night

An AT&T glitch reportedly caused Pasadena’s 9-1-1 system to go offline briefly on Friday night, City officials said.

The system was down for 8 minutes between 10:25 p.m. and 10:33 p.m. before callers were rerouted to the Verdugo Fire Control Center in Glendale, Acting Pasadena Public Information Officer Lisa Derderian said.

Derderian said the City has redundancy built into City procedures and that Pasadena police were immediately notified there was a problem, and “took action quickly based on their protocol to transfer phones to Verdugo” Dispatch during the incident.

Additionally, a Pasadena police dispatcher was sent to the Verdugo Dispatch 911 center to handle the rerouted incoming Pasadena calls for service, Derderian said.

By 11:46 p.m., she said, the phone system was fully restored and calls no longer needed to be rerouted.

Pasadena Now was alerted to the outage by a resident who could not get through to police and eventually drove to Altadena, where she said she was able to connect with the Los Angeles County 911 system. The resident, who did not wish to be named, said she was ultimately transferred to a “fire department” department operator who took down her information. The resident said Pasadena police never responded.

A spokesman for AT&T acknowledged that Friday night “Pasadena 911 calls were briefly rerouted to a neighboring 911 center because of a phone system issue that has … been resolved.”