Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They will probably have to do one under government pressure, but it'll be so heavily NDA'd that no one will ever read it.
The fact that they have a lot of egg on their face after a similar outage in 2012. Heads will roll over this one and politicians will certainly want answers.
https://www.nu.nl/internet/2779095/onderzoek-112-storingen-k...
Unfortunately, I don't know of any such actual democracy.
So if they don't publicly out the report, then the odd's of it staying contained out of public eye are pretty darn high.
The only area in which they could curtail it's release would be if some terrorist type factor or related activity that they could class in that catch-all definition. But even then, details will emerge and it would only delay its publication to fulfill their contractual obligations (think mobile telcos and large business that contract network capacity and links from them with lovely contract SLA's).
Reminds me of the quote or story that someone rather hired an ops engineer that accidentally dropped a database than someone who didn't. As the first one would go at more length preventing to do it again.
I would not trust any other telco to do this better. It seems to me the issue is the commercialization/privatization of KPN. Instead, we should go back to a more semi-public KPN that is assigned to cover this form of critical infrastructure.
Or alternatively, we should not have any telco be a single point of failure.
From https://tweakers.net/nieuws/84839/storing-112-was-opeenstape... :
One of the two fiber links had been down for three weeks, which went unnoticed because of lack of proper monitoring. When Eurofiber started their maintenance on the second link, they caused an outage that lasted all night.
Usually for each NPA (the 3 digit # after the area code) anything ending in 911 redirects to that locality's 911.
This was used by griefers on the early net. You say "you wanna call me up huh go ahead my phone number is XXX-XXX-X911" and they get connected with the police.
That much is obvious. A single switchboard can also cover multiple towns in some circumstances.
>In larger cities it could be zone based. But "911" always has a second # that can directly connect you, ending in 911.
I'll take your word for it since I'm obviously not going to check... I just checked my local PD and I can't find any mention of this whatsoever on their website.
You can always call the police dept. their # will be on their site
If 911 is down, you should call a specific police station. They will be broken down into zones or districts in larger cities, and I can see phone numbers for zones in two cities I've lived in on their sites.
Often in America a "911 outage" is really just an outage with the forwarding, but you could call a specific department.
The problem is in some places there is no city/county system.
Ex: in the suburbs of some cities you'll hit 3 townships in 3 miles, and knowing who to call is not easy even for long time residents.
Any string of numbers that includes 911 dials 911.
... Until I checked the news and found out that things weren't working for anyone.
Quickly put the customer onto the secondary fallback line, and now they're actually happy with me ;-)
There have been three alerts in the past hour. I'm hearing other people's loud phone alarms go off outside, several minutes after mine, so they weren't all sent out at the same time.
We figured it's just a priority order for the bomb shelters.
"All devices in cell" is still accurate. Each cell belongs to a single provider.
It's up to the network backend to make sure all providers get the emergency message at the same time to forward.
This is incorrect. A lot of providers share infrastructure, there are even providers without infrastructure.
My point is just that CMAS-style cell broadcasts need to be repeated by each cell site, and cell sites aren't universally shared by all carriers.
They just sent a new NL-Alert with the right WhatsApp number.
The next test should be on December 2nd, although it feels to me like it's been tested enough today..
I have never gotten an alert on my phone ever.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159110/centurylink-int...
I don't understand why regulators can't drop the reliability requirements and understand that if skype, facetime, whatsapp, viber, twitter, etc. all have 99.9% reliability, then the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down.
Just have a #911Emergency official hashtag and have a bunch of people reply to it. That's the way the people want it.
(Home wifi could work, but the usefulness of an island system is limited. Outer link also worked last time, but what good is that when the other end is not even on UPS? Next hop was optical, but who knows how that is powered and whence.)
The true-but-unhelpful answer is "depends on your ISP and what contract you have with them". A typical home user's "last mile" is almost certainly less reliable than POTS, agreed. But if you make it onto the backbone the internet is better at routing around disruption than the circuit-oriented phone system. So I wouldn't want to count on the phone system always being more reliable.
I can understand Skype and WhatsApp having some kind of official emergency option, but not a hashtag on Twitter.
2. > the chances of them all being down at once is far lower than your POTS line being down.
That depends crucially on the correlation. If there are common fault modes (such as: internet down), the probability might be way higher. (Remember, it used to be common wisdom that it was possible that one or two home owners won't be able to pay their mortgages, but the probability that many will be unable to pay their mortgages is so low that all these MBS and CDO's can be rated AAA...)
3. EDIT to add: Of course, adding communication options can only increase the probability that you can reach your emergency provider, but there's a reason that Skype etc. used to come with these big disclaimers that they're no replacement for POTS, namely the excellent reliability of POTS.
[1] "Although POTS provides limited features, low bandwidth, and no mobile capabilities, it provides greater reliability than other telephony systems (mobile phone, VoIP, etc.). Many telephone service providers attempt to achieve dial-tone availability more than 99.999% of the time the telephone is taken off-hook. This is an often cited benchmark in marketing and systems-engineering comparisons, called the "five nines" reliability standard."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Re...
Until we come up with some universal multi-layered standards which provide at least the same level of uptime and utility, it seems more than a little premature to pull all of it up as a matter of course. Obviously in many places there are space constraints, but that is not usually an issue in arguably the most important use case, at home.
When an emergency happens, what are the chances a POTS phone is nearby? If there isn't a landline within 100 yards of the incident, the POTS network has failed to help.
Now given that, does it really matter if the actual phones have are "3 nines" or "5 nines"?
Having the Dutch government nationalise the 911 service with no compensation to the share holders would be a start.
What I was trying to say was that users are only able contact emergency services through POTS (and, by extension, GSM, obviously). The fact that operators and emergency services use Astrid was sort of beside the point. Although I do believe the last major outage was because of Astrid.
Maybe that would increase the number of prank calls, but maybe that's worth the price.
The more the telephony services are mingled with Internet, the more they are exposed to both Internet security threats and bungle-ups created when applying the various patches and updates that are made necessarily by the constant stream of security updates. Plain POTS has less of that.
It's true that if you put enough quality and maintenance into a system, it can stay at ~100% uptime. But very few organizations have those kinds of resources, and government systems tend to not be funded more than they need to be, and generally aren't staffed with state of the art tech teams.
But it's not unreasonable to imagine the possibility that this can change in the future, if the cost and risk for maintaining such a system were to decrease below a certain threshold.
I work for a company with about 40 employees. Our offices are connected to two different ISPs: one by optical fiber and one by VDSL. We have two different telephone operators for our outgoing calls from the offices, and I have two mobile phones with different operators.
During the last five years there have been multiple outages that lasted between minutes and days, but most of the times the redundancy have saved us. But when we lost power (the whole city went dark for hours) we went down when the batteries in the UPS was drained. Having our own generators is too expensive.
Is there even 911@police.com? or some type of service that can be reached like that? I'm sure this must have happened a lot in the past.
Seems the most reliable would be to ping a friend over internet so he can call the emergency services
After that you have people you know will be available to come to where you are, email or im
After that you have people you know will answer like your manager, the front desk at work, even filing a support ticket at work, the whole goal being getting the attention of someone who knows you
I guess it is cell related in that case.
edit: the 4s was subscribed to the kpn network. Others were not or I can no longer check. Strange thing is I'm getting them first through my personal phone's second sim (vodafone, primary is t-mobile).
No SIM is only interesting in sofar as those phones have attached themselves to the KPN network, they could choose any network for emergency services.
Interestingly all of my coworker and friends did receive a message, but as far as I'm aware they are all on a different network.
I do not like that the supposed 'emergency' messages dit not receive my phone at all. Not even delayed.
It is worrying that these alerts do not seem to work correctly, since it is supposed to replace the 'the air-raid alarm' (in 2021).
Case in point: smoke alarms that wake up half the neighborhood when their batteries need replacement.
I guess the delivery system is just totally fucked, and the spammyness wasn't deliberate
Pulling over and investigating, we discovered my phone ‘alerting’ me to the heavy rain. Err ... cheers. If it did that more than about twice a year I’d be turning it off for sure.
But interesting that there are 3G/4G differences. Have you tried to switch back?
KPN now reports that the problem is 'only on the 4G network', but I'm pretty sure that that is not the case for all subscribers (I'm exclusively on 3G and also have problems), also, their advice to reconfigure phones to connect to 3G only could easily backfire because the 3G network is not capable of dealing with all the traffic if everybody switches.
(Luckily, I guess) I'm not on the KPN network. Just reporting what I'd read on nu.nl.
Can't work out why just the emergency service number failed not other things as well. Bit surprised.
Why couldn't those mobile phone networks of just rerouted the emergency number to the alternative number?
As for large network configuration changes - pish, it really isn't that hard and would literally be a simple update upon their network only that they could just as easily change back. Not talking a global change update, just a per network (mobile) that was working (or the ones that were and able to push out a cell notification).
Hope that made it clearer for you.
This of course doesn't necessarily mean they use ZTE everywhere but can be an indication.
https://nos.nl/liveblog/2290490-112-storing-politie-geeft-al...
They have a very wide reach.
Anyway, good to see that the emergency system works. I just received a second message with a whatsapp number and twitter handle which you can use in case of emergency.
https://www.government.nl/topics/counterterrorism-and-nation...
Average number of millimorts saved by those alerts I bet is really low.
But I guess this is vendor specific, in my case it was a Samsung S9, maybe other vendors implement it differently
What is that? SMS? Phone call?
>> it should be assumed that you are paying attention and don't need to be woken up
That assumption is false. Last week we got one for likely dangerous smoke and we had to get out of the smoke and close all windows and stop ventilation in the house. You might want to wake up for that as some people use the headphones and fall asleep.
Yes it is bad, very bad. But I'm sure they got all the redundancy in place and thought about so much more than we can imagine. But even then there might be some extreme event that will throw 'soot in the food'.
I think it is just great how this event is handled. Almost everybody I know knows the alternative alarm number. Police is in the streets so you can walk to them. And as far as we know there are no looters taking their chances.
So yeah, bad, but we have to wait before we can mark it as big fuckup.
A similar problem is happening in the UK; airports trying to centralize air-traffic control to off-site locations to save a few pennies.
Whatever the post-mortem will say, if the national emergency number goes down, it’s a huge fuck-up. People will die because of this.
The fact that the police has responded in the proper way has nothing to do with how KPN has handled this so far and it immediately puts in question the retiring of the siren system used for emergencies, which for cost-cutting reasons has been replaced by the national mobile phone alert system, which apparently does not work when you really need it.
Other than the outage itself, not much has happened?
Also, what would a siren help in this regard? Can you play the new phone number in morse on the airhorn siren?
- No fall-back system in place.
- Alternative alert system did not work.
- Alternative alert went out with the wrong information.
That seems plenty to me.
As far as the siren is concerned: the general alert system is meant for serious threats to public safety, it does not require 'a new phone number in morse', the output is a single bit: siren on: stay indoors, close doors and windows, wait for all clear sign (three short bursts on the siren).
I guess depends on the height of your house - though in quite a few places even rooftop might be below or close to sea level.
The more likely cause for such an alarm is chemical pollution from either an accidental release or a fire. Their old use was for air raids but those are even more unlikely (at the moment, of course this can change).
* Go inside
* Close doors and windows
* Listen to the emergency channel
* Know when it is safe to go outside again
Sirens are sunsetting, but still operational until 2020.
Also: there was literally no reason at all to stay inside. Sounding the national airhorn alarm because 112 is unreachable is a horrible decision.
Agreed, but 112 not being reachable definitely is. KPN made a big stink about it at the time how other 'crappy' providers could not be trusted to deliver a thing of such national importance and so they got to do it exclusively rather than to have multiple redundant systems by different providers. I'm sure there will be some second guessing of that decision now.
Agreed that sounding the national alarm over this would be an overreaction, as is the fact that they used the national alert, lots of people are going to disable it as a result of this and that will make the system that much less valuable.
As it was some people got no alerts, others got nine and the information dispensed through it was faulty. That's pretty fucked up.
Sending out an incorrect alternative emergency number on the NL-Alert system and not correcting it for about an hour is one instance.
https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/4344848/luchtalarmsirenes-verdw...
I wonder what coused this issue? Dependency issue in Maven? May be they cannot figure out what that Java error means?