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The 911 emergency call system crashed in a large area of Orange County early today because of a glitch in introducing a new area code to the region, the Sheriff’s Department said.

The sheriff’s 911 system was down for nearly 90 minutes in portions of the central and southern county that include about 20 cities, Lt. Ted Boyne said.

“We were unable to receive calls,” he said.

The system was offline from 2:28 a.m. to 3:51 a.m., he said.

Boyne said at the same time, the California Highway Patrol and other agencies in the region had similar problems with their 911 systems.

“They called us, asking us to help out,” Boyne said.

During the 911, callers still were able to dial two regular business numbers to reach dispatchers, and there were no reports of serious problems or emergency calls that went unanswered, he said.

The outage occurred mainly in the 714 area code and was caused by today’s introduction of a new 657 area code, Boyne said.

“Somehow or another it caused the 911 system to crash,” Boyne said.

The Sheriff’s Department contacted AT&T, which fixed the problem, he added.

Calls to an AT&T representative at the corporate headquarters in Texas were not immediately returned.

Beginning today, people in the 714 area had to dial “1″ and the area code to place a call from their homes phones, even to call people within the same area code. The change is a run-up to the scheduled Sept. 23 introduction of the 657 area code for new phones in the region.

The state Public Utilities Commission assigned the overlay code to deal with rising demand for phone numbers in the area.

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