Marion County’s 911 center faced an hourlong outage early Saturday as hundreds of calls poured in from Indianapolis residents reporting gunshots being fired in celebration of the start of 2022.

The 911 call center went down about five minutes past midnight after it had received more than 500 calls about gunshots being recklessly fired in celebration of New Year’s Day.

The system began to return to service by 1 a.m. but it would be another 45 minutes before it was fully functional, said Michael Hubbs, director of the Marion County 911 Center.

“I have never seen anything even close to what happened last night,” he said.

Hubbs said service provider AT&T was investigating what caused the outage, but he believes it was the enormous call volume, The Indianapolis Star reported.

During the interruption, the dispatch center’s Text-to-911 system was still operating, as were all public safety radio communications systems among first responders.

Calls that kept coming in during the outage were rerouted to dispatchers in neighboring counties. But Hubbs said that given the limited number of dispatchers in rural areas and the overwhelming number of calls, there is no way all of them got answered.

Nearly all of the calls were reporting gunfire. Hubbs said that among the calls he could answer he heard gunshots on the line, and there were multiple calls about gunfire going through people’s homes.

But neither he nor police reported any injuries resulting from gunfire during that period.

(AP)