911 is back online

MILTON — Santa Rosa County temporarily lost its 911 service starting around 6:15 p.m. Wednesday night.

By 8:50 p.m., Santa Rosa County Public Information Officer Brandi Whitehurst announced the system had been restored.

The system was offline for less than an hour following a server malfunction according to Whitehurst. During the outage, Whitehurst and Milton Public Information Officer Pamela Holt alerted the public through social media and email of the situation providing contact numbers for law enforcement, fire, and medical emergency aid.

“Emergency Management is currently working to implement additional safeguards to protect against future outages.”

Whitehurst could not say if any emergencies occurred during the outage when a county resident may have needed 911.

“They had a lot of calls just because of the alert that went out about it being down. We had people calling to see what was up because they got an alert but they did not read the actual alert message.”

This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: 911 is back online