SF 911 System Hit by Dropped Cellphone Calls, Hampering Emergency Response

Shortly after 3 p.m. Monday, an internal email landed in San Francisco Police Department inboxes with a warning officers rarely encounter mid-shift: "911 is not working properly at this time." The department advised that station houses "may receive an influx of 911 calls" as a multi-carrier failure stripped AT&T, Xfinity, and Comcast customers of their cellular connection to the city's emergency dispatch center.

If your cellphone cannot reach 911 right now, the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management has confirmed several alternatives. Enabling Wi-Fi calling, texting to 911, or connecting through a friend to make a call are all viable options when cellular service fails. The city's direct line, 415-553-8090, remains reachable regardless of carrier status. If a call to 911 drops mid-connection, call back immediately or move toward a Wi-Fi signal before redialing.

The gap between a dropped cellphone 911 call and a dispatched response is where the real danger lives. When a cellular connection cuts out, dispatchers cannot reliably call back. Unlike a landline tied to a fixed address, a disconnected mobile call leaves operators with no confirmed location and no return number. The SFPD's warning that stations should brace for an influx of walk-ins and precinct-line calls reflects that dynamic precisely: as callers failed to reconnect through the normal system, the department expected residents to seek out any other channel they could find.

The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management went public with the multi-carrier failure at 3:21 p.m. Monday in an alert distributed in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Filipino. The 911 center itself remained operational; the breakdown was on the carrier side, meaning fewer calls reached dispatchers rather than the center going dark entirely. As of around 4 p.m., the issue was reportedly resolved.

It did not stay that way. By Tuesday, the Department of Emergency Management had issued a separate alert for a reported Verizon outage, again advising residents to use Wi-Fi calling, text to 911, or call 415-553-8090. Two major carrier disruptions to 911 access within a single 24-hour window put into sharp relief how routinely San Franciscans' ability to reach emergency services can be severed by infrastructure they have no visibility into and no control over.

The pattern is not new. In January 2026, flooding at an AT&T communications hub in San Rafael knocked out cellphone and 911 service across Marin County, prompting officials to send emergency alerts directing residents to their nearest fire station. A February 2024 AT&T outage presented San Francisco with the same problem, at which point the city directed residents to landlines, a solution increasingly hollow as that infrastructure has contracted across the Bay Area.

Each time a carrier's network fails, the Department of Emergency Management is left issuing workaround guidance rather than activating a parallel system. Whether AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon carries any contractual accountability for service failures that impair public safety, and whether the city has ever formally pressed those vendors on the question, has not been addressed publicly. With two separate carrier outages now disrupting 911 access in the span of a single day, the resilience of San Francisco's emergency communications infrastructure is no longer a theoretical concern.