Phone lines across Annapolis city government went dark Monday afternoon, knocking out non-emergency lines for police and fire departments alongside general municipal offices, while emergency 911 dispatch kept working without interruption. The city confirmed the outage was still ongoing as of 2:50 p.m., and officials urged residents to turn to email and the city's website for anything that couldn't wait.
According to a statement from the City of Annapolis reported by WBAL-TV, city government phone lines went down because of the outage, affecting both general city offices and departments as well as police and fire non-emergency lines. Anne Arundel County also reported general countywide telephone service disruptions affecting incoming and outgoing landline calls Monday, per a county alert cited in the same report. The city advised that residents needing assistance from a city department should use annapolis.gov and email instead of calling in.
Despite the disruption to routine city business, the outlet's report notes that Annapolis's 9-1-1 line is working and that emergency 911 services remain fully operational. Residents who still need to reach police for non-emergency matters were pointed to the Anne Arundel County Police Department's non-emergency line, which the report describes as functioning and available at 410-222-8610.
Verizon Points to a Repair Effort Already Underway
Per the city's Office of Emergency Management, Verizon is working to repair the phone lines, according to the same WBAL-TV report. It's not the first time a Verizon disruption has rattled emergency communications in the region — a nationwide, 10-hour Verizon outage in January 2026 affected more than 1.5 million customers and impaired access to 911 and non-emergency lines in jurisdictions including St. Mary's County, as detailed by Patch, which noted Verizon later issued $20 credits to affected subscribers.
Verizon Maryland LLC's basic landline offerings are regulated by the Maryland Public Service Commission, according to the Maryland Office of People's Counsel. The carrier has also filed public notices under FCC Rule 51.333 regarding short-term network infrastructure adjustments, including switch decommissioning work slated to begin on or after September 30, as Verizon Maryland LLC disclosed in its own filing.
Alternate Channels for Residents Who Need Help
For non-in-progress crimes like property theft or vehicle tampering, residents can report qualifying or previously discovered crimes through an online crime-reporting portal. The CivicReady AlertAnnapolis site is another online resource for residents.
The city also has a volunteer backstop for extended outages: the Anne Arundel–Annapolis Community Emergency Response Team, a corps that local emergency management offices can activate to support emergency response agencies; its volunteers may receive call-center training. Monday's outage did not appear to disrupt the Annapolis City Council's scheduled 7 p.m. public meeting at City Hall, 160 Duke of Gloucester St., where members were set to consider the 2027 meeting schedule and review municipal zoning initiatives, according to a City of Annapolis notice; those meetings are broadcast via local public access channels and YouTube.
Part of a Rough Year for Regional Telecom and IT Systems
Monday's outage lands amid a string of technology failures that have rattled Annapolis-area institutions in recent weeks. Luminis Health, which operates Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, experienced widespread system outages and a temporary Code Black on August 31, with a cybersecurity incident disclosed on September 1; patient portals and internal networks stayed disabled while third-party cybersecurity experts investigated, according to Eye On Annapolis. Hoodline previously reported on that cyberattack roughly two weeks after a bomb threat, which itself followed an earlier incident in which Hoodline reported hospitals locked down by a phone threat.
Multiple Washington D.C.-area hospitals, including Suburban Hospital in Bethesda and Sibley Memorial Hospital in D.C., were temporarily placed in Code Black, with system functionality restored after emergency downtime protocols were triggered, according to WUSA9. Taken together, the string of outages underscores how central Maryland's public institutions have leaned harder on digital backup systems in 2026, even as basic phone infrastructure keeps faltering.
