The outage started earlier in the morning. Rocky Vaz, Dallas’ emergency management office director, said internal notifications alerting employees about the city’s network being down went out at 6:54 a.m.
An AT&T spokesperson said late Wednesday that the issue didn’t affect service in the greater Dallas area.
“We worked quickly to restore Internet service to Dallas City Hall, which was temporarily disrupted this morning by an equipment failure,” the company said in a statement. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The outage initially caused the weekly City Council meeting to be delayed past its 9 a.m. start time because the proceedings couldn’t be televised. As the network issues continued past 11:30 a.m., the meeting was cancelled.
Daisy Torres Fast, director of Dallas’ 311 customer service center, said the outage prevented the city from receiving non-emergency calls and requests via phone, online and its 311 app.
Torres Fast said the city receives roughly 500 phone calls to 311 a day between 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. such as notices of missed trash pickups and possible city code violations.
The city also routes customer service calls related to water bills, the municipal court and the police auto pound to 311 workers. Torres Fast said workers were still able to receive and answer those phone calls but were limited in how they could help callers due to the network being down.
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