Police say power outage led to 101 calls not working
Police have said a power failure was responsible for the force's systems being affected for around 24 hours.
West Mercia Police were unable to answer 101 calls or take incident reports for the website from Monday morning to around 4.52pm on Tuesday.
The force said neighbouring police forces were able to step in while the system was not working, and added that engineers had fixed the problem.
Deputy Chief Constable Julian Moss said the force had invested in new IT infrastructure to prevent such incidents, which is in the process of being put in place.
He said: “Earlier this week we experienced a power failure which had a significant impact on our IT systems and caused damage to some of our infrastructure. This limited our ability to access some systems and manage non-urgent incident reports via 101 and our website.
“Concerted efforts by our engineers have now fixed the problem and we have resumed our usual 101 and website services.
“Contingency plans were put in place with our neighbouring forces, as is standard procedure, to ensure that emergency calls were still received and responded to. Officers and staff continued to respond to high-priority incidents and protect people from harm.
“We put plans in place to provide other ways for the public to contact us for non-urgent matters by extending public access at our main police stations across the three counties we cover to 24 hours a day.
“We know when this happens the impact is significant which is why we have invested in a modern improved digital infrastructure. This in the process of being rolled out across the force to help resolve these issues and prevent such disruption in the future.”
Police and Crime Commissioner John Campion added: “I will continue to support West Mercia Police, investing in resources and technology to ensure West Mercia Police can always provide the best possible service to communities.”
