Nationwide Outage Caused by IT Failure in NATO Country's Military
A number of computer systems in the Netherlands have been affected by an issue believed to have started on a military network. Read Full Article at RT.com.
TroibNews 
A network failure at the Dutch Defense Ministry has resulted in widespread computer issues across the Netherlands, leading to the shutdown of Eindhoven Airport and disruptions in police communications.
The problem, which remains unidentified, was first detected on Tuesday evening within a military network. The Dutch National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) could not confirm if a cyberattack was responsible for the outage.
“We are experiencing an outage in one of our networks at the defense department and it is a network that is also used by other parts of the Dutch government,” stated Laurens Bos, a spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, in comments to AP on Wednesday.
Due to an issue with the data center, the NCSC reported that it was unable to issue security alerts.
Eindhoven Airport, which also has military functions, grounded all flights on Wednesday, causing low-cost airlines Transavia and Ryanair to cancel most of their services. This forced some travelers to take buses 150 kilometers to Brussels, Belgium.
“There is no air traffic at all and we have very little information about the cause,” commented airport spokesperson Judith de Roy.
The Dutch Coast Guard reported issues with their phones and radios, while the national police, responsible for passport controls at airports and seaports, said officers had to resort to using cell phones and texting for communication.
It remains unclear if a “major outage” affecting mobile phone service at provider KPN is connected to the situation at the Defense Ministry.
In contrast, no issues have been reported at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, the country’s largest airport. Hospitals also seem to be functioning normally, along with the Dutch tax administration and the national emergency number (112) service.
Last month, a worldwide computer systems crash occurred due to a flawed security update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, impacting an estimated 8.5 million systems running Microsoft Windows and leading to what has been termed the largest IT outage in history.
Ian Smith contributed to this report for TROIB News
The problem, which remains unidentified, was first detected on Tuesday evening within a military network. The Dutch National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) could not confirm if a cyberattack was responsible for the outage.
“We are experiencing an outage in one of our networks at the defense department and it is a network that is also used by other parts of the Dutch government,” stated Laurens Bos, a spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, in comments to AP on Wednesday.
Due to an issue with the data center, the NCSC reported that it was unable to issue security alerts.
Eindhoven Airport, which also has military functions, grounded all flights on Wednesday, causing low-cost airlines Transavia and Ryanair to cancel most of their services. This forced some travelers to take buses 150 kilometers to Brussels, Belgium.
“There is no air traffic at all and we have very little information about the cause,” commented airport spokesperson Judith de Roy.
The Dutch Coast Guard reported issues with their phones and radios, while the national police, responsible for passport controls at airports and seaports, said officers had to resort to using cell phones and texting for communication.
It remains unclear if a “major outage” affecting mobile phone service at provider KPN is connected to the situation at the Defense Ministry.
In contrast, no issues have been reported at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, the country’s largest airport. Hospitals also seem to be functioning normally, along with the Dutch tax administration and the national emergency number (112) service.
Last month, a worldwide computer systems crash occurred due to a flawed security update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, impacting an estimated 8.5 million systems running Microsoft Windows and leading to what has been termed the largest IT outage in history.
Ian Smith contributed to this report for TROIB News
