Police 111 call centre hit by 30-minute fault

Friday, 17 November 2023

No emergency calls could be transferred through the police 111 call centre for half an hour in early November because of an outage.

A police spokesperson confirmed that 111 calls between 10.25am and 10.55am on Tuesday, November 7, were affected by a fault with the service provider, Spark.

Some calls could not be answered at all, while other calls got through but could not be transferred to the emergency service operator.

“The service provider resolved the issue and police called-back all callers who were not able to be connected to police during the outage,” the police spokesperson said.

Police have four communications centres in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Kāpiti that receive about 60,000 calls a week.

Spark spokesperson Leela Gantman said a software upgrade during routine network maintenance caused an unplanned outage.

“We understand how critical it is for New Zealanders to be able to access emergency services in times of need, and we sincerely apologise to those who were negatively impacted,” she said.

During the outage, Spark's 111 service Initial Call Answering Point (ICAP) operators could receive calls but could not directly transfer those calls to the relevant emergency services operator.

ICAP operators instead passed the 111 caller’s number to the relevant emergency services operator to contact the caller directly, she said.

As call queues built up, some calls to 111 could not be answered but call records were retained. When the outage was resolved, ICAP operators called those people back straight away and passed on their details to emergency services if requested.