National 988 mental health hotline back up after outage

By AMANDA SEITZ
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States’ 988 call service for helping anyone experiencing a mental health emergency is back up and running after a daylong outage. The hotline was out of service Thursday but was restored shortly before midnight and was running Friday. People experiencing a mental health crisis were still able to reach a mental health counselor by texting 988 or visiting 988lifeline.org to start a chat. A Health and Human Services spokeswoman says the federal government is investigating the hotline’s outage. Telecommunications company Intrado provides the emergency response service. The Omaha, Nebraska-based company hasn’t returned repeated requests for comment. A telecoms analyst from Recon Analytics says he doesn’t think there was “anything malicious.”