Austin 3-1-1 Ends Its 24-Hour Era Sunday: Phone Hours Become 7 A.M. to 9 P.M. Starting November 1
The city's front door stops answering around the clock this weekend. The number does not change, and the app and web portal keep taking service requests at any hour.
Starting Sunday, Nov. 1, Austin 3-1-1 answers its phones on a schedule: seven days a week, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., according to the City of Austin's 3-1-1 page. The change ends the around-the-clock phone service the city has long advertised — its own description of the program promises ambassadors "24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year."
The number itself stays the same: 3-1-1 inside Austin, or 512-974-2000 from outside the area code. What changes is only the hour at which a person stops picking up.
Residents are not cut off overnight. Service requests can still be filed at any hour through the Austin 3-1-1 mobile app or the Citizen Web Portal, and they land in the same system city departments work from.
3-1-1 is the city's front door at real scale — more than a million calls a year, producing over 200,000 service requests for city departments, from potholes and missed trash pickups to streetlight outages and animal services.
The new hours take hold on one of the busiest weekends on Austin's calendar: Halloween night downtown, a home game at the university, and the end of daylight saving time, all before the first 7-to-9 day begins on Sunday.
