The D.C. Office of Unified Communications reported a problem with 911 calls on Wednesday evening. The issue affected the agency’s ability to accurately pinpoint the quadrant of emergency calls from landline phones.

“OUC is aware of an issue, identified by one of our 911 call takers, related to discrepancies with our technology in identifying quadrants on landline calls only,” reads a statement posted to the agency’s Twitter account. The statement also notes that the agency was trying to fix the problem with AT&T.

It is not clear yet if the problem has been resolved. OUC did not immediately respond to WAMU/DCist’s request for more information about the discrepancy, the impact on response to 911 calls, or whether the issue was fixed.

The news of the landline problem comes as the D.C. auditor released a new report which offers renewed criticism of the 911 service’s progress on fixing dispatch times and location accuracy.

The District’s emergency communications and dispatch system has been plagued by worrying errors and problems over the past several years. A 2021 audit found that call dispatchers were not accurately pinpointing callers’ locations and were falling short of national standards for dispatch times, particularly for high-priority calls coming from Wards 7 and 8. A year later, a second review of the agency’s work found “minimal progress” towards solutions for the beleaguered system.

The updated audit released Thursday finds that the agency has made some progress towards fulfilling recommendations from previous audits, but there’s still a long way to go.

“It can be stated that the issues that have plagued the call-taking and dispatch operations are rooted in long-established processes and habits but are now being addressed by Management,” the audit reads. “However, there has been no improvement in compliance with national standards for either emergency call answering or dispatch requirements.”

The audit’s review of 99,000 priority medical calls from Sept. 2021  to Aug. 2022 indicates that on about half of calls, the agency is not meeting national standards on “time-to-answer” measures (the speed at which call takers pick up emergency calls) or “answer to notification” measures (the time between when an emergency call is answered to when a call taker sends dispatch information to a first responder unit).

“For the 12-month period ending August 31, 2022, the OUC was not in compliance with the 60-second answer to notification requirement for any part of the period,” the audit reads. The agency’s best performance came in October 2021, when just under a third of notifications went out in under a minute.

The new audit also criticizes the agency’s procedures for conducting after-action reports. It found a “failure to be accurate and transparent” in reviews of two 2022 emergency responses where infants died. In one, first responders were sent to the wrong address, and in another, a dispatcher began to close the call despite a child being in cardiac arrest, resulting in first responders arriving on scene a full 14 minutes after the original call for help.

In a response to a first draft of the new audit, OUC acting director Heather McGaffin contended that the agency has “made great strides” towards fulfilling recommendations from previous audits. She suggested that OUC was 76% of the way finished with implementation, and expects to be fully done this summer.

In a subsequent response, the D.C. auditor pushed back on that characterization of the agency’s progress, saying that the audit team either found no clear documentation of progress on some recommendations, or thought it “is simply too soon to evaluate whether progress has been made.”

OUC has also had several high-profile leadership shake-ups. Most recently, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser appointed McGaffin as the agency’s new acting director — after pushback from the D.C. Council forced Bowser to withdraw her nominee for the permanent role, who previously ran the agency but resigned during the 2021 audit. Earlier this month, another former leader of OUC announced a lawsuit against the Bowser administration, alleging that officials had shut down attempts to address the systemic problems at the agency.