February 13, 2020

We wanted to inform everyone of an issue that occurred while we were trying to process our One Call Now System Notifications this morning for the school delay.

Overnight, a telecommunications server at One Call Now's Data Center (Our Notification Partner System) went down and their system engineers were immediately dispatched to repair the system. All systems became operational a few hours later, after our initial communications were sent at 04:51 a.m.

When I spoke to the network engineers, they found a hardware problem and quickly resolved it within the morning hours. Although the texting system was down, the immediate back-up at One Call Now System is to place a phone call, when a text message is not successful to your cellular carrier. Thereafter, software engineers noticed the abundance of not only our text messages waiting to be sent, but from other school districts across the east coast to whom had weather alerts to send out this morning. The decision was then made by One Call Now to initiate the text messages again, to be sure their systems were operational. Thus some members of the text groups were notified multiple times in text messages beginning at 06:08 a.m. through 08:01 a.m.

Another issue that is occurring in-which you may notice now, or in the near future, has to do with the SPAM Filtering that many Tier 1 Cellular Carriers are starting to use. The issue is with the cell phone providers (Verizon, AT&T, Cricket, ect.) send you the text message. You may have to contact your service provider to unblock what is called short codes. Short codes are the Five-digit telephone numbers used for SMS text messaging within the One Call Now System. For Example: 223-00. It is highly suggested that you enter the SMS Text Message Number 223-00 into your contacts as Wayne Highlands for example, so that your phone will receive these messages correctly. If you are currently receiving text messages you should be fine at this time.

As of 10:42 a.m, this date, all systems at One Call Now are fully operational. We apologize on their behalf of the technology error that occurred over night, and we will continue to monitor and maintain our partnership with them to be sure our notifications systems can be trusted and are reliable for our communications.