A mobile device determines that a communications tower is unresponsive to non-emergency wireless signals, and receives user input to select a recipient for an emergency message from a group of pre-registered recipients. The mobile device presents a group of pre-configured status indicators and receives user input to select a particular status indicator. The mobile device generates a text-based emergency message based on the selected recipient, the selected status indicator, location information for the mobile device, and a time stamp. The mobile device sends, to a message server that is different than the message recipient, the text-based emergency message. To determine a status of the message originator without requiring a connection between mobile devices, the intended recipient initiates a fetch message request to retrieve the text-based emergency message from the message server.