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The short answer is it doesn't, it just dials 911. Way, way back in the day when dial-up was a thing, I worked at a company that had an automated system that c
by jmvoodoo 5y ago
The short answer is it doesn't, it just dials 911.
Way, way back in the day when dial-up was a thing, I worked at a company that had an automated system that called a large bank of test numbers to make sure they were still working. This system ran 24/7. It required you to put in the numbers as <areacode>-<number> without a prefixed 1. The code would add the 1 automatically. Because it operated in a lab inside of our phone system, it dialed 9 to dial out. Well, at some point someone had to reconfigure this system and I guess thought it would be good to add a 1 before each # in the configuration.
This resulted in thousands of 911 calls being made to our local call center. We had accidentally created a 911 war-dialer.
The moral of this story is don't dial 9 to get an external line. You're literally a keystroke away from calling 911 every single day.
- paranoidrobot 5y agoIn Australia the Emergency number is 000. I ran into a similar issue with software that was trying to dial 0 for an outside line, and then a number starting with 00. Lots of very unhappy people.
- flatiron 5y agoAs with any short answer the real answer is “it depends”. Any modern internal phone system has a dial plan and the default will certainly call 911 but you can certainly change it. I used to work inside a call center where you had to dial 91 to get an outside line. You can imagine how many people accident dialed 911. Since we couldn’t muck with 911 we made outbound dialing straight from the sip client only and not through the handset and told people not to dial outbound to order lunch or whatever from the handset. We didn’t care about them ordering lunch just couldn’t muck with 911. But that being said I could have most certainly changed the dial plan instead and screwed with 911.