The public wasn’t notified about a 911 outage until about three hours after problems began because the Honolulu Police Department was struggling to come up with an alternate means of communication, officials said Monday. Police are investigating what caused the 911 outage and failure of the regular backup system.

Honolulu Police Department officials provided an update after Honolulu’s 911 system went down on Sunday, Nov. 17. HPD said they first noticed communication problems around 10:38 a.m. when they could not connect with the Honolulu Fire Department,

Capt. Kurihara said that Sunday afternoons are usually a slow time for 911 calls, but HPD can't be sure how many calls it may have missed during the outage. Police are still trying to figure out what went wrong technically as the investigation continues.