Outage in the Netherlands

Network breakdown paralyzed airport and authorities

According to the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), public safety in the Netherlands was not at risk.(Bild: APA/dpa/Felix Kästle)

A fault in the data center of the Dutch Ministry of Defense has temporarily paralyzed Eindhoven Airport and numerous authorities. Institutions that use the ministry's network for their IT systems were affected.

These included the Ministry of Justice, the coast guard, the Dutch gendarmerie responsible for border protection and numerous municipalities, reported the ANP news agency. It took hours for the situation to normalize; planes were able to take off again from Eindhoven from 17:00.

According to the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), public safety in the Netherlands was not at risk. According to ANP, there were no indications of a cyber attack or sabotage. The cause of the outage had been narrowed down, the Ministry of Defense said late in the afternoon. However, it will be several hours before all systems are fully functional again.

Passengers stranded
Thousands of travelers at the second-largest airport in the Netherlands probably suffered the most from the IT failures. Airlines and tour operators took some passengers by bus to other airports, where replacement flights were organized for them - including Maastricht, Düsseldorf and Brussels. Others had to wait in Eindhoven.

For the Netherlands, the network failure was the second in just a few weeks. As recently as mid-July, the country was affected by the consequences of a faulty software update for an IT security system from the US company Crowdstrike, based in Texas. This caused severe disruptions worldwide, including flights being canceled, hospitals having to cancel operations and bank customers being unable to withdraw money from ATMs.