D.C. firefighters and police officers were unable to communicate with the 911 center for about two hours over the weekend.
A power failure at the main communications center and backup facility also prevented people from calling 911, WTTG-TV reported.
The incident started about 11:30 p.m. Saturday, and lasted until about 1:30 a.m.
Residents were notified by local media of two different 10 digit numbers to call, one for fires or medical issues, and the other for police. Communications center officials say there's no way to determine how many calls were missed.
Typically, they would received 3000-350 calls during that two hour window.
With no way to contact police to check their welfare, officers were directed to return to headquarters. From there, they were sent to standby at certain intersections, the station reported.
One officer was notified of a barricade situation, according to reports.
"As the power comes into the facility it goes to a number of different boxes that route the power to our systems, those boxes all went down at the same time," Chris Geldart, director of DC Homeland Security, told reporters.
