A phone outage that affected Storey and Lyon county prompted the rerouting of emergency calls from those jurisdictions through the Carson City Dispatch Center for several hours Tuesday morning.
Lyon County Sheriff's Capt. Kathy Heston said work on a router by AT&T caused the outages which began at about 3 a.m. Service was sporadic until about 11 a.m.
Carson City Dispatch Supervisor Karen Mracek said her dispatchers handled just a few calls for the surrounding counties.
Douglas County Sheriff's Sgt. Jim Halsey said the outages affected thousands of phone customers there.
According to Jonathan Davies of Verizon Media Relations, the service went down when AT&T deployed new fiber optics. When they changed the connection, the network went down, taking phone systems with it.
Gardnerville was isolated for a several hours in the morning, with cell phone customers having trouble calling land lines. Long distance calls were also out.
Douglas County Emergency Management rerouted their traffic to keep 911 operating during the outage.