Nebraska: Southeast Nebraska 911 services went down after Lincoln data center fire

On Saturday, September 2, a fire at a data center in Lincoln, Nebraska, shut down 911 services in the state's southeast. According to reports, the data center in issue was a Windstream facility in Lincoln. A transformer shorted and exploded due to a fire in the data center, cutting power to the two primary controls. The facility's secondary generator was then activated but failed shortly after that. Then, the data center relied on its battery reserve.

According to Windstream, as the battery power continued to deplete, they turned down one of their switches that provided connectivity to the 911 services in the counties of Gage, Otoe, Saunders, and Adams. It is also possible that the counties of Butler, Cass, Clay, Fillmore, Jefferson, Johnson, Lancaster, Nuckolls, Pawnee, Richardson, Saline, Seward, Thayer, and York were affected.

Lincoln Fire and Rescue stated that a water escape that reached electrical equipment caused the fire. As of Sunday morning, 911 services were once again operational.

This outage occurred just days after a statewide 911 service interruption in Nebraska. On Thursday, August 31, Lumen reported that a fiber disconnection within its Omaha network had caused an outage. According to the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC), several 911 centers throughout the state were impacted.