The 911 emergency line on Hawaiʻi Island went down early Monday morning just as Hurricane Lala was tearing through the state, leaving residents who needed police, fire, or ambulance help with only a backup landline number to fall back on. The Hawaiʻi Police Department reported the outage at 5:23 a.m., according to a Civil Defense message relayed through the county's alert system, and directed anyone with an emergency to call 808-935-3311 instead.
The alert, posted by Hawaii EMA, specified that the backup number requires a land line rather than a cell phone and is meant for emergencies requiring a police, fire, or ambulance response. Hawaii EMA also noted that its social media accounts are not monitored around the clock, and it reminded residents to call 911 directly whenever the line is working. People facing an active emergency were told they could go to the nearest emergency response location if phone lines failed entirely.
The failure landed in the middle of one of the worst storms to hit the island in years. Hurricane Lala knocked out power to more than 200,000 customers statewide and triggered widespread flooding, fallen trees, and major road closures across Hawaiʻi Island, according to Hawaiʻi County. That combination made the emergency line's failure especially dangerous, since the same flooding and downed trees that were straining first responders also made it hazardous for stranded residents to physically travel anywhere for help.
State Offices Closed While Emergency Crews Stayed On
Because of the extensive damage from the storm, Governor Josh Green ordered non-emergency state and county government offices closed on Monday, while emergency response centers remained fully staffed and operational, per Civil Beat. That meant dispatchers and first responders were already managing multiple rescue operations across the island at the same moment the primary line meant to reach them had gone dark.
For West Hawaiʻi residents specifically, the Hawaiʻi Police Department has previously advised that when local phone lines or 911 systems fail, people should seek help directly at district police stations, including facilities in Kailua-Kona, Nāʻālehu, Ocean View, and Captain Cook. Those station locations become especially important during communications blackouts, given how spread out the island's rural geography is.
A Pattern of Outages Across the Islands
Monday's failure was not an isolated glitch. Hawaiʻi Island has seen previous 911 disruptions, including a technical issue at police communications centers in July and a June 2025 outage that affected Verizon Wireless automatic location systems. Hawaiian Telcom, which maintains the core statewide routing infrastructure for emergency calls, also had an equipment failure in November 2024 that disrupted mobile 911 routing across public safety answering points statewide, as reported by Hawaii News Now.
The volume of traffic normally flowing through Hawaiʻi County's emergency line underscores what was at stake. The county's call center handled 214,220 911 calls in 2025, accounting for 14% of the state's total emergency call volume, per the Hawaiʻi Department of Accounting and General Services — the second-largest dispatch load in the state after Oʻahu.
Federal Rules Require Fast Carrier Notice
Federal regulations that took effect in April 2025 require telecommunications carriers to notify affected public safety answering points within 30 minutes of discovering any outage that could impact 911 service, with follow-up status updates required every two hours until the problem is resolved. Separately, carriers experiencing a network outage lasting at least 30 minutes must file an initial report in the FCC's Network Outage Reporting System within 120 minutes of discovery, according to the Federal Communications Commission. It remains unclear whether Monday's outage complied with those disclosure windows, and the exact technical cause and duration of the failure have not been detailed.
Ahead of Lala's arrival, T-Mobile had activated satellite-to-cellular capabilities via Starlink across Hawaiʻi, allowing compatible phones to send basic text messages and Text-to-911 even if terrestrial cell towers went down. Whether that satellite backup was accessible to residents affected by Monday's 911 line failure is not addressed in available reporting.
This is not the first time a Hawaiʻi 911 system has faltered in recent months. In February, a carrier glitch sent Oʻahu emergency calls on a detour to a mainland national center before they were redirected to local dispatchers. Whether Monday's Big Island outage traces back to storm damage, a carrier hardware glitch, or the widespread power blackouts sweeping the state is an open question that has not yet been resolved by officials.
