Crews troubleshooting a network failure preventing El Paso County 911 calls for two hours

EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) -- IT technicians with the El Paso-Teller County 911 Authority are investigating what caused a 911 outage early Tuesday morning. Just after 12:30, the 911 Authority learned that all callers were being sent to a busy signal.

"We're still in the early stages of looking into what the root cause of that network malfunction is," said Ben Bills, Public Information Officer with the 911 Authority.

The Authority is responsible for the technology that connects 911 calls to local agencies. They say they believe network issues are to blame, but right now they still don't know the root cause.

"I've had brief contact with the folks that are working on the issue and have been since early this morning, but I don't know exactly what the cause was when regarding the network malfunction."

The 911 Authority could not provide information on the specific technical issue or who contacted them about the problem.

The El Paso County Sheriff's Office, Colorado Springs Police Department, and Colorado Springs Fire Department alerted the public about the outage over Twitter, instructing anyone who needed to help to text 911 or call alternate numbers for help.

The 911 call system came back online over two hours later at around 3.

The 911 Authority says they will release more information once they learn exactly what happened.