Cities across the country are experiencing 911 outages, sometimes lasting hours. For example, on June 18, the statewide 911 system was down for nearly two hours.

In that one incident, about seven million people were without 911 service for nearly two hours, according to USA Today. These crashes shine a light on the nation’s fragmented emergency response system. The outages have occurred in at least eight states so far this year, making them more of a feature than a bug in the system.

Many of the problems plaguing emergency communications include the wide variations in the age and capabilities of the systems and the funding of 911 systems across the country. Some cities, states and counties have modernized their systems or are making plans to upgrade, but many others are lagging behind.

The 911 system is usually supported by fees added to phone bills, but state and local governments also use general funds or other resources to pay for the system. Jonathan Gilad, vice president of government affairs at the National Emergency Number Association, said in a statement: “Now there are haves and have-nots. Next-generation 911 should not be for people who happen to have an emergency in a good location.”

As these outages continue, federal legislation that would spend billions of dollars to modernize the entire 911 system remains stalled in Congress. George Kelemen, executive director of the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies, said in a statement: “This is a national security imperative. In a crisis — a school shooting or a house fire or, God forbid, a terrorist attack — people call 911 first. The system cannot fail.”

In 1968, the U.S. introduced its universal 911 emergency number as a way to simplify crisis response. Instead of a seamless national program, however, the 911 response network has become a giant puzzle with many interlocking pieces. According to federal data, there are more than 6,000 911 call centers that handle an estimated 240 million emergency calls per year.

A February survey by the National Emergency Number Association, which sets standards and advocates for 911, found that more than three-quarters of call centers had experienced outages in the previous 12 months. In April, millions of people in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota and Texas were affected by widespread 911 outages.

In February, tens of thousands of people in areas of California, Georgia, Illinois, Texas and other states lost their cellphone service, including some 911 services, due to an outage. In June, Verizon agreed to pay a $1.05 million fine to settle a Federal Communications Commission investigation into a December 2022 outage that affected 911 calls in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Lawmakers have looked at modernizing 911 systems by tapping into revenues the FCC collects from auctioning off the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Legislation that would allocate nearly $15 billion in subsidies from auction proceeds to accelerate the deployment of next-generation 911 in every state passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously in May 2023.

Other bills have been introduced by various lawmakers. So far, none have passed. Nine former FCC chairmen wrote to lawmakers in February, urging them to make 911 upgrades a national priority. They wrote, “Regardless of the funding source, the need is urgent, and the time to act is now.”