IT failure in NATO country’s military causes nationwide outage

The Dutch authorities were unable to say whether a cyberattack could be to blame

A network failure at the Dutch Defense Ministry has caused cascading computer problems across the Netherlands, shutting down Eindhoven Airport and even disrupting police communications.

The unspecified problem was first detected on Tuesday evening on a military network. The Dutch National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) could not say whether the outage was caused by a cyberattack.

“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,” Laurens Bos, a Defense Ministry spokesperson, told AP on Wednesday.

The NCSC noted that it could not send out security alerts due to a problem with the data center.

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Eindhoven Airport, which also serves as a military installation, had to ground all flights on Wednesday. Low-cost carriers Transavia and Ryanair canceled most of their flights, forcing some passengers to take buses 150km south to Brussels, Belgium.

“There is no air traffic at all and we have very little information about the cause,” airport spokesperson Judith de Roy told the media.

The Dutch Coast Guard said their phones and radios weren’t working. The Dutch national police, which is in charge of passport controls at airports and seaports, also said its officers had resorted to using cell phones and texting. 

It was unclear whether the “major outage” with the mobile telephone service at provider KPN was related to the issue at the Defense Ministry.

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On the other hand, no problems have been reported at the country’s largest airport, Schiphol in Amsterdam. Hospitals also appeared unaffected, as did the Dutch tax administration and the national emergency number (112) service.

Last month, computer systems all across the world crashed due to a bad security update deployed by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. An estimated 8.5 million systems running Microsoft Windows were unable to properly restart for most of the day in what has been described as the largest IT outage in history.