Updated at 6 p.m.: Revised to reflect the cause of the outage and that service has been restored.

A technical glitch caused an outage for 911 service across 13 counties spanning the Dallas-Fort Worth area Wednesday afternoon.

The outage began around noon, and the network had been fully restored by 3:30 p.m., North Central Texas Council of Governments 911 program director Christy Williams said at a news conference.

The glitch caused the program's first outage in more than 26 years, Williams said.

Tarrant and Denton counties were spared from the outage, and most of Dallas County was too, minus a few exceptions like Balch Springs, Cockrell Hill, Seagoville and Wilmer. Richardson, Plano, Wylie and Ennis didn't experience the outage.

Those cities and counties not affected by the outage are not part of the network's service area.

The 13 affected counties were: Collin, Erath, Ellis, Hood, Hunt, Johnson, Kaufman, Navarro, Palo Pinto, Parker, Rockwall, Somervell and Wise counties.

The emergency call program manually rerouted 911 calls so that callers would be connected to law enforcement departments' non-emergency lines if they called during the outage, but dispatchers were unable to see callers' locations like they can when the 911 network is functional.

"Citizens MUST know their location," NCTCOG posted on its website for people calling non-emergency lines.

Williams said the outage wasn't a result of a "malicious attack" on the system, and the program has no concerns about the reliability of the 911 system.

"We have been operating for more than 26 years, and we have never had an outage," she said. "This was a technical glitch that was not able to be identified in advance."

Williams said she couldn't elaborate on the glitch, citing national security concerns, but she said that once reports analyzing the cause of the technical issue are completed, the North Central Texas Council of Governments will share its findings with other 911 centers in the industry.

Wednesday's outage was unrelated to problems with the city of Dallas' 911 call system, in which T-Mobile customers trying to reach emergency services had their calls rerouted if an operator didn't pick up within a certain time period.