Widespread emergency services number outage hits Germany

Emergency services numbers briefly went out of operation across Germany on Thursday morning, with network operator Deutsche Telekom blaming a technical problem and ruling out a hacker attack.

The federal office for civil protection and disaster relief (BBK) reported disruptions to the 112 and 110 emergency numbers used to contact the police, fire brigade or the ambulance service, between 0330 and 0440 GMT.

Several states including southwestern Baden-Wuerttemberg and central Saxony-Anhalt were affected by the outage, as well as major cities Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne.

The last of these was also hit by widespread cuts to electricity, drinking water and telephone services.

The disruption was reported “very quickly” by Deutsche Telekom, BBK president Armin Schuster told German media group RND.

Deutsche Telekom said “the introduction of new software” was likely to blame even though “it was extensively tested beforehand”. adding that a detailed analysis was ongoing.

“We can rule out the possibility of a hacker attack,” a spokesman added.

In the eastern state of Lower Saxony, as well as the emergency numbers, the internal phone networks of the police and hospitals also suffered outages.

A number of areas in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein were also affected, as well as other cities in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse.

The German government pledged millions of euros to upgrade its crisis network after deadly floods in July, including installing more warning sirens and establishing a mobile phone alert system.

In September, an issue in the Deutsche Telekom network led to disruptions to emergency numbers lasting 30 minutes.

The company said there was no connection between the September incident and Thursday’s outages.

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