Oakland 911 disruption: Possible criminal cause

Thank you, Mayor Lee. Good afternoon. I appreciate everyone coming out here today. So just after 8.30 p.m. yesterday evening, Oakland Police Department dispatchers noticed that the computer-aided dispatch system had frozen and displayed an error message. Dispatchers immediately tested our emergency and non-emergency lines and discovered that all phone lines, internet, and CAD system was down. Just after 9.45 p.m., 911 calls were transferred to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. Oakland Police Department dispatchers have been relocated to the Oakland Fire Department Dispatch Center and the Alameda County Sheriff's Dispatch Center. Alameda County is currently answering 911 calls, and we are relaying the information to our dispatchers here that are located at the Fire Dispatch Center. We want to thank the Oakland community for your patience, understanding, and commitment and support to our teams as we work to restore the system and maintain essential emergency response operations. I definitely want to send out a huge thank you to the Alameda County Sheriff's Department. Immediately upon contacting the sheriff yesterday evening, they stepped up in a big way and helped us transition our calls and our staff to their dispatch center, which really helped us streamline getting our services back online. At this point, I'm going to turn it over to Director Tony Battala from our Information Technology Division. Thank you, Chief Beer. I'm Tony Battala, City IT Director. Last night when my department learned of the incident, we immediately coordinated with OPD, Oakland Fire, and AT&T to coordinate a response. It's since been determined that AT&T fiber optic lines were damaged, which caused the outage, and my department is working now with AT&T to facilitate the restoration, which is expected to happen later this evening. Going forward, we'll continue to work with AT&T and our partners to mitigate and strengthen our infrastructure and ensure incidents like this don't happen again. Thank you. Thank you, sir. And before we open up for Q&A, I want you to know that AT&T did release a statement. We'll get it to you at the end, so I'll hand it out to you with that open up for questions. Can you talk a little bit about the overall 911 system? I mean, how is it that it's able to have, like, one line that gets cut or damaged and it has this kind of impact? Is there no redundancy within the system? So with regards to the 911 line, we do have some fallback plans. And not to get into the details of it, but unfortunately, both of the initial fallback plans were compromised last night. So we had to fall back to our outside partner, which is the Alameda County Sheriff's Department. There are some additional steps we can take if, say, there was a catastrophic failure even with the Sheriff's Department. But we are working together. The fire chief and myself met earlier this morning to talk about exploring new technology that's not reliant on an infrastructure with lines that are running across the ground, but also more up to speed on what we see as the best practice to continue communications in the region. If the lines are compromised, what does that mean? What happened and how did that happen? So immediately once we realized that this was not a normal situation that we've experienced in the past, I've been with the police department almost 30 years, and we've seen outages. We've seen generators go down, but we've never seen our optic lines be nonfunctioning, our phones being disconnected, and then to see it bleed over into the fire department where their 911 system went down as well, it was very concerning. So when we found out that that was an issue, we immediately reached out to the sheriff's department because time is of the essence, and it does take time for our vendor, AT&T, to show up on scene so we can push those 911 calls utilizing their technology to the Sheriff's Department. Earlier this morning, we did confirm that there was damage to not just the fiber optics but also to the copper lines. We had already treated it as an investigation, as a criminal act. We're always looking at these as the worst-case possibility. We initiated a call-out of our investigators of the Criminal Investigation Division. We've also activated our Intelligence Unit. We reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigations if we need additional resources, but we're leaving everything on the table. This is an active investigation. We do have some leads that we're following up on, and we're receiving information from the community. So my message to all of you out there is if you did see something, please call, let us know. If you have heard of anything that might lead us to the people responsible for this, please call 9-1-1 if you have an emergency call 9-1-1 the system's up and running if for some reason you try to call us last night and you weren't able to get through please call us we do have staff on like i said we have oakland police officer oh sorry oakland police dispatchers here at the oakland fire department's dispatch center we have oakland dispatchers at the alameda county sheriff's department and our officers are they're well staffed and we're ready to respond for your calls so we're looking at all of those things uh at this point i i would i i would say this is more of a bad actor than a vandalism uh particularly just because there's more than one line and uh the amount of damage that was done however again we're looking at everything we're going to follow every lead. We speak to anyone that's willing to talk to us. We're going to utilize technology to get additional information. We're going to work with our county and our federal partners to follow up on this. NBC, last question. You're saying if anyone has seen anything, they can reach out to let you know? To that end, can you give us a specific location or even a general area where this happened or where you are looking, concentrating on and interested and tips about if you observe anyone in suspicious activity or believe that they're damaging any type of copper wire or fiber optics please call 9-1-1 and we're going to respond in kind unfortunately this is an epidemic issue not just here in the Bay Area but all throughout California copper wiring and theft of fiber optics is an issue that we're struggling with all a lot of other agencies are seeing this as well so whether it's in the city of Oakland or another city please call 911. This is a perfect example of theft leading to something far more severe and serious that could result in people losing their lives. With that, we appreciate it. Thank you so much.