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Chicago's 911 System Crashes

UPDATED 07/03/12 7:36 a.m.

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Computers were down overnight at Chicago's 911 dispatch center, after the state-of-the-art system unexpectedly crashed.

As CBS 2's Susanna Song reports, the system crashed late Monday night. Officials at the Office of Emergency Management and Communications do not know the exact cause of the failure.

The system routes emergency calls from the dispatch center, at 1411 W. Madison St., to police officers in the field.

Delores Robinson, a spokeswoman for the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, told the Sun-Times Media Wire the system went down around 9 p.m. Monday and was restored by 1 a.m. Tuesday.

During the outage, dispatchers manually directed officers to emergencies through their radios. That reportedly continued as of 6:30 a.m.

Technicians have been working at the center Tuesday morning trying to figure out the cause and make repairs.
Police say service for 911 calls have not been impacted.

Calls are getting to the officers on time, and there apparently have been no delays.

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