Harford County's emergency dispatch system lost access to its recently-installed consoles Friday afternoon.
The main system was not operable for more than two hours. "Normal operations" were resumed at 4:56 p.m., according to monitored broadcasts.
The malfunction did not affect 911 calls being made to the county, Emergency Services Director Edward Hopkins said.
A backup system was used while the problem was fixed.
The consoles, which are used to dispatch police, fire and emergency medical calls, went down at about 2:30 p.m. and Motorola was investigating the cause, Hopkins said at about 4 p.m.
The emergency operations center is using its older system instead, he said, so "things are a little slower" as far as communication to or among first responders. Hopkins said firefighters were asked to attend to their stations with their crews because of this.
Nevertheless, he said, the incident has caused "minimal impact," as "we train and practice for this all the time."
Phone lines remained intact to receive any emergency 911 calls from the public, he reassured.
The system, which went operational this spring, is housed in a seven-month old building, in the Hickory area north of Bel Air, that was built primarily for emergency operations; however, county information technology operations were moved into part of the facility earlier this year.
This week the county administration changed the exterior sign on the facility from "Harford County Department of Emergency Services" to "Harford County Government."