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AT&T: Brief 911 outage hits customers in DC region

WASHINGTON — AT&T customers in the region were unable to place calls during a brief nationwide outage on Saturday.

A hardware issue caused some calls to not connect, according to AT&T.

D.C. residents were alerted of the outage at around 1 p.m.

Alan Etter, spokesman with D.C.’s Office of Unified Communications, said AT&T told his office that the intermittent interruptions in service affected all calls made from it’s system, including calls to 911.

By 1:20 p.m., a spokeswoman for AT&T said service had been restored. Etter said 911 seems to be working at this point, but he said testing would continue throughout the day.

Saturday’s outage comes days after AT&T had issues with 911 service at a nationwide level.

On Wednesday night, customers in the D.C. region were unable to make calls for two hours. That outage may have impacted millions of customers in dozens of states across the country, including Texas, Florida and Tennessee.

The FCC is investigating the Wednesday outage.

WTOP’s Mike Murillo contributed to this report.

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