Oakland police say their phone, internet and computer-aided dispatch systems have been down since Wednesday night, forcing 911 calls to be rerouted through the Alameda County Sheriff's dispatch center and the city's own fire dispatch. Dispatchers are currently responding only to Priority 1 calls while crews scramble to figure out what broke.
Dispatch System Froze Wednesday Night
According to KTVU, Oakland police noticed their dispatch system had frozen at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday. By 9:45 p.m., the department began transferring 911 calls to the sheriff's office and to Oakland fire dispatch, a stopgap that has kept emergency lines functioning even as the underlying technology stays offline.
In a post on X, the Oakland Police Dept.
confirmed that its phone, internet and CAD systems are down, and that the Alameda County Sheriff is answering 911 calls and relaying them to OPD dispatchers. The department said its IT team is working with AT&T to restore services, and that it is responding only to Priority One calls in the meantime.
Fire Crews Still Responding, Cause Unclear
Fire crews are still responding to 911 fire and medical calls, the department said, and that side of emergency response has not been interrupted. The OAK311 non-emergency line is affected by the same issue, leaving residents without their usual channel for city service requests. As of the latest report, it's unclear what caused the system to stop working.
A Familiar Problem for Oakland's 911 Network
This isn't the first time Oakland has had to lean on Alameda County to keep emergency calls flowing. Back in July 2023, the city temporarily routed incoming 911 calls through the sheriff's office while dispatchers relocated to an unaffected facility, as SFGATE reported at the time. Phone lines were eventually restored, but the automated dispatch system stayed down and slowed call routing for days afterward. A separate failure that year forced the city's automated dispatch center to revert to manual call routing entirely, according to NBC Bay Area.
The technology at the center of these repeated breakdowns traces back to a 2017 upgrade, when the Oakland City Council authorized $12.8 million for a new public-safety IT system that included dispatch and records-management software from Motorola, per ABC7 News. A civil grand jury report later found that software and hardware were never fully implemented and had become unsupported, and an OPD report described the Motorola software as difficult to use and blamed it for increased report times.
Longstanding Strain on Oakland's Emergency Response
The outage lands on top of years of documented strain on Oakland's 911 system. The Oaklandside has reported that the city's dispatch center has long struggled with insufficient staffing, grueling working conditions, mandatory overtime and a slow hiring process, problems that contributed to more than 123,000 callers — 40% of the year's total — waiting at least 40 seconds to connect in 2023 alone.
Oakland has been working to close that gap under pressure from the state. The California Office of Emergency Services requires the city to answer 90% of 911 calls within 15 seconds, but as of September 2024 Oakland was only hitting 51%, with an average answer time of 50 seconds — more than triple the state standard, according to NBC Bay Area's investigative reporting. CalOES has since increased its monitoring of the call center through monthly meetings after the city missed its deadline to fix the problem.
For now, Oakland residents facing anything short of a top-priority emergency are being asked to wait as the city's IT department and AT&T work to bring phone, internet and dispatch systems back online.
