Late Friday night and early Saturday morning, hackers set off 156 emergency sirens in and around the city of Dallas, Texas. According to The Dallas Morning News, the sirens began blaring shortly before midnight on Friday and were shut off and reactivated “more than a dozen times” before emergency workers shut the system down entirely at around 1:20am on Saturday morning, after confirming that there was no actual emergency and that it wasn’t the result of some benign malfunction.
The city tried to tell residents that there was no emergency and not to call 911, but the system was nevertheless flooded with calls. The 911 line received more than 4,400 calls between 11:30pm Friday and 3am Saturday, double the number received between 11pm and 7am on a typical night. At its peak, the call volume and a short-staffed call center pushed wait times as high as six minutes—the city’s goal is to answer most 911 calls within 10 seconds.
