AT&T says its wireless 911 now working — but why so slow to communicate?

Issue has been resolved that affected some calls to 911 from wireless customers. We apologize to those who were affected.

— AT&T (@ATT) March 9, 2017

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At 10:30 p.m. AT&T told us its problems with 911 and its wireless phones have been resolved. Good news. The outage apparently lasted at least four and half hours.

Here is the question I have about all of this. It has to do with communicating during a crisis. The first tweet about this problem that I could find was at 5:49 pm ET from Morgantown, West Virginia.

Many more tweets started coming in from 911 centers, police, EMS and fire across the country in the 6:00 & 7:00 hours. Why did it it take a communications company until 9:49 pm to put up its first tweet acknowledging there was a problem.

This communications problem may be a bigger failure for AT&T than 911 going down on its phones.