A problem with IT networks in the Netherlands affected Eindhoven Airport and several public services, including the coast guard and military police, on Wednesday.
“Due to problems with the IT networks of the Ministry of Defense, no air traffic is currently possible at Eindhoven Airport,” the Netherlands’ second-largest airport wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The Dutch Ministry of Defense also reported disruptions on Wednesday, citing an IT problem. “Employees are having trouble logging in and in some cases the provision of services is affected because telephone numbers are unreachable,” the ministry said in a statement.
Eindhoven Airport did not provide any information about the cause of the problem, but said in a statement on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that there would be no flight traffic until at least 5 p.m. local time (3 p.m. GMT). The country’s largest airport, Schiphol near Amsterdam, meanwhile, appeared to be operating normally.
Local media reported that airlines were trying to transfer passengers from Eindhoven to Düsseldorf airport in Germany so they could continue their journey.
Which other services were affected by the outage?
Other public services in the Netherlands also appear to be affected by the outage. Several government agencies, including the coast guard and the military police, which is responsible for border protection, reported computer outages.
The coast guard said in a statement that it could not be reached by phone or radio due to the power outage. It asked people in emergency situations to call 112. The military police contact center was also unreachable, the authorities said.
Dutch emergency services also experienced a nationwide outage that disrupted their normal alert and communications system, but they said national emergency numbers continued to work.
It was not immediately clear whether there was a connection between the disturbances.
Sources at the National Cybersecurity Center told local media outlet AD that there was no evidence of a cyberattack so far, but added that one outage could contribute to another.
Last month, airlines, banks and media outlets around the world were thrown into chaos by one of the biggest IT outages in recent years, caused by an antivirus update.
dh/sms (AFP, dpa, Reuters)
