Tuesday's 911 outage in Massachusetts has been blamed on a firewall.

As reported by the Associated Press, a firewall designed to prevent cyberattacks and hacking was given as the cause of the outage by state officials yesterday.

The outage, which lasted for two hours between 1:15 pm and around 3:15 pm, meant that people were unable to call the number in case of an emergency.

It led state authorities to advise people to call local emergency services contacts instead, providing a range of regional dispatch numbers.

According to the executive director of the state 911 department Frank Pozniak, an early investigation into the outage found that a firewall was the cause.

“The Massachusetts State 911 Department is deeply committed to providing reliable, state-of-the-art 911 services to all Massachusetts residents and visitors in an emergency. The Department will take all necessary steps to prevent a future occurrence,” said Pozniak in a statement. “We are grateful to everyone for their patience and cooperation during the outage.”

Pozniak said that the firewall prevented calls being made to 911 dispatch centers.

The State 911 Department said that it didn’t receive any reports of emergencies impacted during the interruption.

In February, parts of the US were impacted when making 911 calls following an AT&T outage.

A widespread 911 outage impacted four US states in April. In that instance, all of South Dakota and parts of Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas were hit.