A technical issue that prevented people from getting proper notifications of an Amber Alert earlier this week has been fixed.
The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) issued an Amber Alert on Wednesday for a three-month-old baby, who was later found safe.
However, at the time, OPP experienced a technical glitch when they tried to issue the alert.
After contacting the Provincial Emergency Operations Centre and its counterpart at Emergency Management Ontario, the alert was issued on the OPP's behalf to LTE-connected wireless devices in the Roseneath area, where the child was last seen.
OPP released an update on Friday with details about the issue.
"We have now identified that this issue was the result of an automated third-party software update," read the OPP update. "The issue has been resolved, and the OPP's AMBER Alert system is once again fully functional."
OPP have outlined multiple steps to help ensure this problem doesn't occur again in the future. They include:
- OPP technical teams have been working to create a backup to circumvent automated updates that are outside the OPP's control.
- The OPP is creating a manual process to enable access to the National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination system (also known as Alert Ready) without third-party software.
- The OPP will continue to test the system on a regular basis.
