ALPENA — At about 5:50 p.m. Monday evening, Alpena County Central Dispatch alerted residents that service had been restored to its 911 system, which had been unavailable for about 20 minutes.

Kim Elkie, Alpena County 911 director, said the dispatch center’s fiber provider experienced an outage that impacted at least some of the state’s 911 call centers.

Upon losing service, Alpena’s dispatch center switched immediately to its backup system, then returned to its regular system as soon as service was restored, Elkie said.

During the brief outage, residents with an emergency could contact the non-emergency line at 989-354-9111 and reach the same dispatchers that would answer a 911 call.