Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number (go.com) 24
A major telephone outage hit the Netherlands on Monday, taking down the country's emergency number and leaving many businesses and municipalities unreachable by phone. From a report: Police sent officers onto the streets so that people could approach them for emergency help and issued an alternative emergency phone number an hour after the outage began around 4 p.m. (1400 GMT). "We're appealing to everybody who wants to report an emergency and needs help to ... go onto the street. Police officers with walkie-talkies are taking to the streets as much as possible so they can be spoken to," police spokeswoman Suzanne van de Graaf told national broadcaster NOS. Telecom provider KPN reported on its website that the nationwide outage affected both landlines and mobile services. It said work was underway to find a solution.
Since the story doesn't list the number (Score:3, Funny)
It's 0118 999 88199 9119725 3 [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
It's 0118 999 88199 9119725 3 [youtube.com]
These days that number just puts you through to the Transphobic Hate Line.
Managed to post the wrong number (Score:3)
In an amazing display of incompetence, the authorities managed to send everyone in the country the wrong alternative Whatsapp number using the emergency broadcast sysem (along with a correct phone number, thankfully).
The whatsapp number belonged to a major newspaper.
How is this possible? (Score:2)
It only happened an hour ago and it's already on slashdot?
Re: (Score:1)
Don’t worry, it’ll be on Slashdot again tomorrow and a third time two hours after that.
too many strange outages... (Score:5, Interesting)
Surely i'm not the only one that finds the recent spat of infrastructure outages to be too coincidental. It really suggests a state-level cyberarmy testing out weapons.
Re:too many strange outages... (Score:5, Insightful)
Complexity breeds problems. Testing is almost impossible because the systems are so complex it has become a house of cards. Eventually the recursive requirements between systems means eventually it will all go down, probably due to a simple oversight, and be almost impossible to bring back up.