Mamdani admin admits it tried to keep 911 blackout secret as officials grilled over separate outage
The Mamdani administration was forced to reveal it hid a nearly two-hour 911 system disruption for months as city lawmakers grilled Hizzoner’s team over a separate, troubling system outage.
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Lisa Gelobter, the commissioner of the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation, was repeatedly called to task by the City Council on Wednesday over the massive service disruption on Aug. 18 and admitted the admin had no plans to disclose the outage.
Gelobter made the admission that the system had also been down for about 110 minutes in May, which had not been previously made public as he was hammered with questions about how the administration handled the August outage.
“That is wild,” said a stunned Councilman Oswald Feliz (D-Bronx), who chairs the public safety committee.
“There was a two-hour outage, and the public was not told about it. Taking these outages and just sweeping them under the rug, keeping them a secret, is outrageous. This is so detrimental.”
While the May outage was much smaller in scale than August blackout, it still barred a dozen text message calls for help from getting through to emergency services.
“If people are texting, they are in imminent danger — a fire, medical,” Feliz said, pressing as to what caused the outage and why the public wasn’t informed.
A gobsmacked Gelobter could only muster up that the city needs to “explore” some sort of public transparency around 911 system failures.
The widescale mid-August outage blocked just under 1,700 people in distress from contacting first responders between 3 a.m. and 10 a.m. following a software update overnight.
Gelobter conceded during the hourslong grilling that her office had scrambled to figure out the scope of the system errors nearly seven hours into the episode when an NYPD staffer discovered the widespread outage and alerted OTI.
“People could have died because you were not doing your job,” railed Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens)
“Why wasn’t the public notified? Systems break down; we know that but [the public] could not get help if it needed it,” Ariola said. “It should have been addressed much sooner.”
News of the downed emergency systems was first revealed in the media.
The public weren’t the only ones left in the dark.
OTI failed to alert New York City’s Office of Emergency Management of the massive system errors.
The tech commish tried to defend her agency’s response, telling lawmakers that four hours into the outage they were unsure what the exact issues were, but that 70% of calls were being answered.
She also added that no one had been seriously injured as a result of the outage.
However, she noted that their review had not been completed and hundreds of callers had not been followed up with in the weeks following.
Gelobter eventually said as the Mamdani administration continues it’s analysis, officials “will try to make a list of all the stakeholders who should be notified in the future.”
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