“Government and emergency services were insufficiently prepared for 112 national outages” – IT Pro – News

Dutch governments and emergency services were insufficiently prepared for a national 112 outage. The Telecom Agency announced this in a report on the 112 outage in 2019. According to the report, communication about the outage was ‘chaotic’.

The Telecom Agency published a report this week on the national 112 outage on June 24, 2019. The agency published the report in collaboration with the Justice and Security Inspectorate, the Healthcare and Youth Inspectorate. According to the study, communication about the disruption to residents of the Netherlands was ‘chaotic’, the Telecom Agency writes.

When it became clear to the authorities that 112 was experiencing a malfunction, it turned out that the Ministry of Justice and Security and many of the security regions were not aware of the agreements made regarding the procedure for emergency calls, the report states. As a result, the authorities had to ‘improvise a lot’, while this would not have been necessary if the organizations had worked out the agreements made earlier.

This concerns agreements that were made after a 112 outage in 2012. These agreements were laid down in a scenario with several possible scenarios. The public authorities opted for ‘scenario 4’, which according to the report is best suited to the failure in question. Incidentally, this scenario assumes that the other emergency number, 0900-8844, is still available. That was not the case. As a result, according to the report, the Ministry of Justice and Security waited too long to inform citizens via an NL-Alert message.

Furthermore, plans by healthcare organizations did not foresee a national inaccessibility of 112 and a national telephone disturbance. The consequences of this have been solved by the investigated care organizations, by using alternative means of communication and additional personnel. The report also concludes that there has been good, and a great deal of ingenuity, between different care organizations.

Three people died during the national disruption. It is unclear whether the delayed start of relief has contributed to this, the report said. However, the ambulance services involved state that they could act within the standard time.

The outage occurred due to ‘a hidden error in KPN’s routing platform’. This platform determines the ‘route’ of all incoming telephone calls over the KPN network. There are ‘counters’ that keep track of the number of incoming calls. Due to a software update, these counters started to run simultaneously, which meant that the systems could fail simultaneously.

The NL-Alert outage, which also occurred on June 24, 2019, was not related to the system error at KPN. This disruption meant that KPN customers who used 4G were temporarily unable to receive NL-Alert notifications. According to the report, KPN took measures immediately after the outages to prevent a recurrence. Most of these measures have now been implemented, including an adjustment to the software configuration of the four routing systems.

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