CLALLAM COUNTY – 911 Emergency phone lines were down throughout most of Washington state overnight but were restored, at least in Clallam County, at around 4:00 this morning. There was another brief outage at around 6:30 AM for 15 minutes or so before coming back on.

The cause of the problem has not yet been released by the carrier, Century Link.

During the outage, local police departments and the Sheriff’s Office were urging residents to call their dispatch phone lines directly as Century Link worked on the problem.

Here’s Karl Hatton, Regional Emergency Communications Director for both PennCom and JeffCom, with the latest:

Hatton says at one point overnight, about half of the country was without 911 services.

This is not the first CenturyLink 911 outage in Washington.

It also happened in 2014 and the state fined the company $2.8 million when more than 5,000 911 calls couldn’t be made.