The Del Rio Police Department said Wednesday night that a service outage affecting an unspecified "major cellular carrier" was preventing residents from being able to call 911.
Authorities in the South Texas border city emphasized in a Facebook post that the "issue is with the carrier and not the City of Del Rio systems," urging the public to call 911 with a landline or through a functioning carrier if they have an emergency. Various other U.S. communities were reporting similar issues Wednesday night, including Spearfish, Nevada, were police said the entire state was experiencing 911 service outages. Officials in Henderson, Nevada, and Aberdeen, South Dakota, were also reporting the problem, and in Las Vegas – a city of more than 650,000 people – residents were warned of the 911 outage before police said around 9 p.m. that calls were functioning again.