Emergency calls in Penobscot County are being routed through the state Department of Public Safety dispatch center instead of the county after a series of malfunctions with the county’s 911 system over the weekend.

Penobscot County, which dispatches for roughly 60 communities in that county, had its 911 system malfunction on Friday at 9:30 a.m. For a short period of time, calls to the center were getting a busy signal, said Jim Ryan, center director.

The 911 calls were transferred to the state facility in Orono. That transfer was quick seamless, Ryan said.

The Penobscot County problems are reminiscent of problems experienced at the Cumberland County dispatch center and the state dispatch center in Gray earlier this spring.

In one of the county outages though, the transfer to a backup system took about an hour because of miscommunication at the telephone company’s customer call center.

Technicians thought they had traced the problem to a software configuration issue and fixed that problem at all six facilities in the state with similar equipment, one of those being Penobscot County. The recent problems have sent them scrambling to find a cause.

Penobscot County’s system was restored at 3:30 p.m. Friday only to go back down at 5 p.m.

The system was restored Saturday morning but failed again at 1 a.m. Sunday. The 911 calls are still being routed to the state facility at the direction of the Emergency Services Communications Bureau while technicians try to diagnose the problem.

Ryan said residents should continue to call 911 in an emergency because all the calls currently are being received, recorded and dispatched without problems, just through the state barracks instead of the county.