IT problems paralyze Dutch coast guard, military, airport
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A problem with IT networks in the Netherlands on Wednesday affected an Eindhoven Airport and several public services, including the coast guard and military police.
“Due to problems with IT-networks at the Ministery of Defense there is no air traffic possible at Eindhoven Airport at this moment,” the second largest airport in the Netherlands wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The Dutch Defense Ministry also reported its own disruption on Wednesday, citing an IT problem. “Employees are experiencing login problems and in some cases there is an impact on service provision because telephone numbers are not reachable,” the ministry said in a statement.
Eindhoven Airport did not say what caused the problem, but in a statement on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, the airport said there would be no air traffic until at least 17:00 local time (15:00 GMT). Meanwhile, the country’s main airport, Schiphol near Amsterdam, appeared to be operating normally.
Airlines were trying to get passengers from Eindhoven to Düsseldorf airport in Germany to continue their journeys, local media reported.
What other services were affected by the outage?
Several other public services in the Netherlands appear to have been affected by the outage. Several government agencies, including the coast guard and the military police, which is responsible for border protection, reported computer failures.
The coast guard said in a statement that it was “not reachable” by phone or radio due to the outage. It urged people in an emergency situation to call 112. The military police’s contact center was also unavailable, authorities said.
Dutch emergency services also experienced a nationwide outage that disrupted their usual alarm and communication system. However, they said national emergency numbers were still working.
It was not immediately clear if there was a connection between the disruptions.
Sources at the National Cybersecurity Center told local media outlet AD that there is no evidence yet of a cyberattack, but added that one outage could be contributing to the other.
Last month, airlines, banks, and media outlets around the world were thrown into chaos by one of the largest IT outages in recent years caused by an antivirus update.
