ATLANTA — Leaders with the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services are making a public plea after phone problems shut down the State's central child abuse reporting hotline for nearly five hours. The agency is taking action to make sure children in danger don't fall through the cracks.
"Because of the nature of these issues, we're very concerned," said DFCS spokeswoman Ashley Fielding. "We want to make sure that the public is aware that this outage occurred and we want to urge them to call again in the event that they tried and were not able to get through to us."
Fielding told Channel 2 investigative reporter Aaron Diamant that the vendor notified the agency of a subcontractor's nationwide phone outage around 6 p.m. Thursday.
"So we immediately reached out to law enforcement and made sure they had local contacts. Many of them already did, because of the way that they work on the scene," Fielding said.
Still, DFCS figures it may have missed as many as 30 calls, the amount that typically comes in during that timeframe.
"You can never underestimate how important these calls are especially to the children in these situations," Fielding said.
DFCS set up the 24-7 hotline as part of a massive agency-wide technology upgrade in 2014.
"That was to make sure that it was easier for the public to make those reports when they had concerns," Fielding said.
DFCS says the outage did not affect child abuse reports made online or by fax. Meanwhile, if you tried to call in a report Thursday night and got disconnected, DFCS wants you to call back as soon as possible at 855-422-4453.
WSBTV
