Lumen Technologies has acknowledged that disruption to its network contributed to last week's 911 outage.
The outage, which impacted all of South Dakota and parts of Nebraska, and Nevada, meant that some residents couldn't reach the emergency services across multiple cities for a couple of hours.
Reports have since emerged that link Lumen to the outage, though the Louisiana-based telco said it wasn't to blame for the outage.
The telco said that disruption to its network was caused by a third-party company installing a light pole. Lumen said that this was "unrelated to its services."
"On April 17, some customers in Nevada, South Dakota, and Nebraska experienced an outage due to a third-party company installing a light pole – unrelated to our services," said Lumen in a statement.
"We restored all services in approximately two and a half hours. Our techs identified the issue and worked hard to fix it as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding."
The outage lasted for around two-and-a-half hours before the service was restored. The full impact of the outage is not yet known, and the incident is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Parts of Texas were also impacted by the outage last week, though Lumen is not the 911 provider in that state.
Authorities across the four states reported 911 outages on the evening of April 17, including the Department of Public Safety in South Dakota, police in Las Vegas, the Nebraska county of Douglas, and the Texas city of Del Rio.
