National 988 mental health hotline back up

WASHINGTON — The nation’s 988 hotline, intended to help anyone experiencing a mental health emergency, was back up and running, Friday, after a daylong outage.

The call service, which was launched in July, was restored, shortly before midnight, on Thursday. People experiencing a mental health crisis were still able to reach a mental health counselor by texting 988 or by visiting 988lifeline.org to start a chat.

The federal government is investigating the hotline’s outage, Health and Human Services spokeswoman Sarah Lovenheim said in a tweet, late Thursday night.