999 outage a chance to reflect on how far we’ve come

Emergency Line the envy of the world

July 4 2023

Sunday June 25th will be a day that nobody in the Emergency Services will remember fondly. In an unprecedented event of recent times, the UK’s 999 Emergency Telephone Line encountered a fault, rendering it unusable for most of the day. As technical teams worked flat out to restore service and the government, via its media teams, tried to manage communications throughout an uncertain period, the nation held its breath.

Now that the inquiry has begun into what happened, questions are predictably being asked about the line’s resilience and whether modern technology played a part in the failure. But before everyone wades in with their tuppence worth of criticism, do we really appreciate the strides that have been made with the service?

Magic Number

The whole idea of the 999 emergency number is that it is one number to call for anyone who is an emergency, whether that be related to Ambulance, Fire, Police or even the Coast Guard. No need to remember separate numbers, just dial those 3 digits and you will be connected to an operator who will route you to the appropriate service. However, when that one number failed last Sunday, all lines of communication to the various services became unreachable.

First introduced in the London area in June 1937, the UK's 999 number is the world's oldest emergency telephone service. The envy of the world when launched, the system, as you would expect, did not start out life operating in its current form. Back then, the platform was much more mechanical-based. However, the objective was the same. A caller dialling 999 would be connected to the operator in the same way as a regular call, but light and sound signals in the telephone exchange would alert the operator that this was a priority call. If no operator was free to make the call, the operator would break off dealing with a regular call. At 1st, it was an attack on the senses, the red lights and klaxon made the environment noisy and chaotic and, according to reports at the time, “when the raucous buzzer sounded in the quiet disciplined switchrooms a few of the operators found the situation too much for them and had to be carried out. It was even suggested in the press that the buzzers were disturbing other people living in the vicinity of the exchanges”.

When the call was answered, operators would quickly move cables with auxiliary connections between switches, connecting the call to the required service.

The scheme initially covered a 12-mile radius around Oxford Circus and the advertisement in the local news paper informing residents of when and how to use the new service was interesting, to say the least.

“The service is only to be used in an ongoing emergency if for instance, the man in the flat next to yours is murdering his wife or you have seen a heavily masked cat burglar peering round the stack pipe of the local bank building."

It’s fair to say, Media and Public Relations training has also come a long way.

Quick Impact

Once up and running, the new service soon started to earn its crust. The 1st call to the Police resulted in an arrest for burglary. In the first week there were 1336 emergency 999 calls and 1896 emergency calls using the old way of dialling 0. By the end of July around 13,000 genuine emergency 999 calls had been dealt with. Compare that to today, where there are over 95,000 emergency calls made each day, and you can see the pressures the current system is being put under.

The service was later introduced in Glasgow in 1938 but the Second World War delayed the expansion. But after the war, in 1946, the cities of Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle were next to benefit. By 1948, all the larger towns served by automatic exchanges had the 999 service and in 1976, 39 years after the service was 1st launched, all telephone exchanges in Britain became automated, allowing the 999 service to be operational nationwide.

Fast forward to 2023 and the system used for this hugely important service is a very different beast. Much more software-based, network-reliant, and technology-driven than its 86-year-old legacy platform, last week’s events drew the predictable slew of comments from detractors accusing IT issues of being responsible for a “glitch” in the system that could have caused the issues. Comments proclaiming that this “Wouldn’t have happened with the trusty mechanical system” have been rolled out. However, these views would be unjust and unfounded. Telephone switching has been software-based since the 1980s (and exclusively by the late 1990s once the digital switch rollout was completed).

As advancements have been made in the platform, so too has progression in the features. We’ve come a long way since those early, red light and klaxon days. Huge strides have been made in the way that we call for help. From a caller point of view, devices are more modern, are mobile, are smaller. The locations where we can call from is more wide-ranging and more diverse than ever. The information that is available to 999 emergency call handlers is more readily available and infinitely more detailed. The ability to pinpoint a caller’s location, via GPS, is more advanced and is being developed all the time. Being able to immediately find and pass on the location of a 999 call, pinpoint additional and precise location-related data from mobile devices and handle the ever-rising call volumes would never have been achievable without the use of the modern, software-driven systems. Many of these advances and features were developed and delivered by BT, the company that provides the current 999 service.

Prior to digitalisation, in order to know someone’s location, if for example they had made a call and were unable to communicate due to injury or ill health the operator would require an engineer to be called out, requesting them to travel to the exchange, carry out a painstaking manual trace of the call, look the number up in paper records and then get that information to the emergency services. Visualise that process in your head while also wondering how the caller is doing.

Today, approximately 35 million 999/112 calls are made in the UK each year (up from 25 million back in 2000) with 74% from mobiles and 26% from landlines in 2022. Just over half of calls are for ambulances, just under half are for police with a small percentage requesting fire and coastguard services.

The system is made up of 3 Primary Network clusters and a back up cluster. Unfortunately, on the day of the incident, all 3 of the primary clusters failed, meaning that the back up system had to be promoted to service calls while the primary network was restored.

An interim Root Cause report has been submitted and the definitive reason for the failure of the primary cluster will be determined and, once permanently addressed, follow up actions will be identified and improvements will be implemented, as with all major incidents of this type.

Innovation Appreciation

But we mustn’t criticise modern technology and the advancements within it for one major incident in decades, no matter how significant. On the contrary, the truly incredible service that the modern emergency system, its technology, and those who continue to develop and support it, has provided should not be underestimated. Just like in 1937, when the house burglar was apprehended in that 1st use of the new line, sometimes we need to stop to appreciate the systems that innovation and invention has given us, in this case the saving of millions of lives, rather than being quick to judge and criticise on the very rare and short-lived occasions that they fail.