In January, several PSAP managers posted on public forums that their agencies were receiving calls from citizens saying they had received a text message advising them to call 9-1-1. The message received was coming from Verizon Wireless and read: “Please make a voice call to 9-1-1. There’s no text service to 9-1-1 available at this time.” Or “You cannot text 9-1-1, call 9-1-1.”

According to one post, the message was being delivered to customers who had sent a text to another number — not 9-1-1.

It turns out that the message was being sent to Verizon customers due to a coding error by a short message service provider.

Susan Sherwood, manager E9-1-1 Network Compliance for Verizon Wireless, addressed the issue. In her online post, she states that Verizon became aware of the issue on Jan. 24 and that customers were receiving the 9-1-1 text error message when they were using Facebook via the Facebook text short code.

Sherwood says, “This message was being delivered from one of our SMS gateway providers, Sybase. Sybase was apparently doing some integration work with Facebook, and the 9-1-1 error message was erroneously attached to the Facebook short code.”

According to Sherwood, the problem has been fixed. The 9-1-1 text message will correctly be transmitted to subscribers who text 9-1-1.