911 Outage Currently Impacts Landlines In Iowa

Your cellphone may have sent you an alert earlier today.

A 911 outage is going through Iowa at the moment and it's impacting landline phones, according to Iowa Homeland Security and Scott County Emergency Management.

It is because of an issue with their service provider, Lumen Technologies.

If you have a landline phone and need to reach 911, you're asked to use a cellphone to either call or text 911. The Texting 911 feature is available in all Iowa counties.

The outage has been going on for hours (ever since this morning) and there is no timeline on when the 911 landline outage might be fixed in Iowa. Crews are on site working to fix the problem.

Officials remind you that cellphones do not have to have an active plan or be with a carrier's system to call 911. As they deal with the current outage, you're asked not to try calling 911 on your landline if you don't actually need emergency services.

The state says that when 911 outages occur, they will conduct a thorough investigation to figure out what happened and how it can be prevented from happening again.

Remember: this outage affects just landline phones. Your cell is fine to use if you need it. Besides landline phones, you may also run into internet issues with this outage too. But officials ask you to not contact 911 unless you have a real emergency. You can keep up with the latest on the 911 outage as crews work to fix it on Scott County Emergency Management's Facebook page.