Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

When the 9-1-1 emergency phone line faltered on Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Justin Elicker directed New Haveners to an alternative hotline: the Yale Police Department’s number.

The 9-1-1 hotline began experiencing issues across Connecticut just before noon, according to the statewide Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection. By 2 p.m., at least 11 cities and towns had reported difficulties in calling or texting 9-1-1. Several Connecticut emergency departments, like the Danbury Police and East Hampton Police, alerted residents of temporary police landlines or fire department numbers to call instead of 9-1-1. Meanwhile, New Haven routed its residents to a different department.

“In the interim, if you are experiencing a life-threatening emergency, you can call the Yale emergency call center,” Elicker wrote in a blast sent out through the New Haven Alerts emergency notification system at 1:58 p.m. “We are actively working with the state and emergency services personnel to restore service as quickly as possible and will update residents accordingly.”

At 2:18 p.m., the YPD sent out a Yale Alert notifying University community members of the outage. The alert instructed Yalies to call the YPD number in the event of an emergency, or to call the West Haven Police Department’s landline number if they were to require emergency services on Yale’s West Campus in the neighboring city.

Lenny Speiller, the mayor’s communications director, said that the city’s emergency response team connected with Yale’s emergency response unit to ensure they had the capacity to take on calls during the outage before sending the alert. 

Anthony Campbell, the Yale Police Department’s chief, confirmed that the mayor’s office asked him for assistance after the line went down. Campbell informed the city officials that the YPD’s phone lines were fully operational, and set in motion what he referred to as the “Redundancy Plan.”

“YPD serves as a backup for New Haven’s dispatch, and they do the same for us if our systems go down,” Campbell wrote in a statement to the News.

For the duration of the outage, YPD allowed New Haven’s Public Safety Answering Point personnel — the first point of reception for a 9-1-1 call — to dispatch from the YPD’s phone line. Emergency calls from around the city were routed to the YPD’s dispatch, and the New Haven dispatchers took calls and dispatched their officers accordingly, Campbell wrote.

Campbell clarified that YPD officers did not respond to calls outside of the department’s area of responsibility during the outage.

Elicker released a statement at 3:12 p.m. advising New Haveners that the 9-1-1 line was back up and running in the city. The Yale Police later sent out a Yale Alert at 4:18 p.m. stating that an “All clear has been provided.”

During the outage, calls to 9-1-1 from landlines and Verizon Wireless numbers did not go through, Speiller explained. He said that some calls from T-Mobile and AT&T users were unaffected. 

“We’re waiting for further information from the state and telecommunication carriers as to what happened,” Speiller said.

The state’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection repeatedly emphasized that the issues with the 9-1-1 line did not point to malicious intent.

“This is a commercial carrier equipment issue,” Clayton Northgraves, director of Statewide Emergency Communications, said in a statement to NBC News around 2:30 p.m. “There is not any evidence to indicate a deliberate attack. We do not have confirmation from every municipality that they are having issues, but the issue is being seen across the state.”

Northgraves later said that issues experienced by 9-1-1 text lines were due to those lines being flooded with more messages than usual when the phone lines were down.

The Yale Police Department, headquartered at 101 Ashmun St., can be reached by phone at (203) 432-4400.