911, please hold.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...o-babys-death/

This is kinda shocking.

I recall reading about a hack in Washington state (I think?) where someone was cloning numbers and using an auto-dial to flood 911. Naturally everyone's blaming the Russians. Maybe this is happening at a carrier-specific level?

The emergency phone network seems pretty easy to disable in a DOS-style attack. Then again, what's the solution? If 911 were to develop a predictive system to block calls deemed "illegitimate" during a volume surge, would people accept it knowing there's an inevitable error rate?

There was an issue in Australia in the 90s when the internet and smart devices started to become prevalent. There the emergency services number is 000

Issue is that some of the early intelligent vending machines that dial home when they need a refill could lose their phone number in some circumstances like a power cut and the phone number would default to a string of 0s - resulting in machines calling the emergency services.