Over 200 calls to Garda unanswered as fallback emergency system also fails during 999 outage

The higher-than-usual volume of 216 calls during the 72-minute failure was attributed to multiple “test calls” as well as calls from emergency services and other State agencies. File picture: Larry Cummins

A fallback automated system for answering 999 calls also failed during an outage of the emergency call service during the summer.

A major incident report into the Emergency Call Answering Service (Ecas) failure estimated it was likely about 120 actual emergency calls had been missed even though more than 200 were logged during the outage.