Emergency 911 phone services are working after Frontier Communications Corp. engineers resolved a hardware or software issue that disabled NIU’s service from 7 p.m. Sept. 19 through 2:20 p.m. Sept. 22.

Frontier Communications, a telecommunications company that operates NIU’s 911 service, experienced an issue in the hardware or software in Frontier’s switch, the device that makes and breaks the connection in an electric circuit.

This caused the 911 emergency service at NIU and in DeKalb, Sycamore, Boone, Stephenson and Ogle counties to not function to its normal standard, according to a press release from Frontier Communications.

Frontier engineers diagnosed the issue Sept. 19 and designed a solution to reroute phone traffic so 911 calls could be completed while Frontier’s technical team worked to resolve the outage, according to the press release.

“If someone were to call 911 [on campus], they would be routed to the appropriate police agency at [that] point,” NIU Police Commander Don Rodman said. “If [anyone called] the emergency number, they would speak to one of our dispatchers and it would be the same thing. If they for some reason call 911, they would get our dispatcher again based on the proximity of where they are on campus.”

Agencies in the surrounding areas affected by the outage each handled the situation differently. Boone County rolled their emergency calls over to the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department; Stephenson sent calls to District 19 and other surrounding agencies; Ogle County was still able to receive emergency calls but experienced a screen and mapping outage.

The only difference students encountered when dialing the 911 emergency number was that the call did not go through the traditional 911 line.

“Traditionally, when they call, [operators] will say ‘911 what’s your emergency?’ ” Rodman said on Sept. 21.“So this phone is not going to recognize that it’s a 911 number at this point [and] will just come through as a non-emergency number, so that’s why the 911 system is not in full operations at this point.”

If in an emergency situation, students had access to resources like the campus emergency towers which use a system separate from 911.

“It [would give] me more closure to know that the 911 emergency number works,” said Mike Mulanix, senior physical education major. “But I felt that it was safe. We could still use 911 and the emergency towers even though the [911] emergency service was out.”