911 goes down across L.A. County Sheriff’s Department areas overnight

Los Angeles County’s 911 system was down overnight before coming back online Friday morning, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.

Shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday, the department was notified of a service disruption affecting the Vesta System, a third-party public safety call-handling platform used to manage 911 calls within the Sheriff’s Department’s jurisdiction.

During the outage, 911 calls were automatically rerouted to patrol station business lines to maintain emergency coverage. Some individual stations were able to accept 911 text messages. When texting, residents were instructed to include their exact location, the nature of the emergency and their name.

About 7:20 a.m. on Friday, the system was fully restored, the department said in a statement.

“The Vesta System is not owned or maintained by the Sheriff’s Department,” the statement said. “Department personnel continue to work with the third-party telecommunications provider to determine the root cause of the outage and identify corrective measures to help prevent this issue from occurring again.”