Widespread Emergency Services Number Outage Hits Germany

Emergency services numbers went out of operation across Germany on Thursday morning before being reestablished later in the day, officials said, with the cause as yet unknown

Frankfurt, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Nov, 2021 ) :Emergency services numbers went out of operation across Germany on Thursday morning before being reestablished later in the day, officials said, with the cause as yet unknown.

The Federal office for civil protection and disaster relief (BBK) reported disruptions to the 112 and 110 emergency numbers used to contact the police, fire brigade or the ambulance service, between 0330 and 0440 GMT.

Several states including southwestern Baden-Wuerttemberg and central Saxony-Anhalt were affected by the outage, as well as major cities Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne.

The last of these was also hit by widespread cuts to electricity, drinking water and telephone services.

In the eastern state of Lower Saxony, as well as the emergency numbers, the internal phone networks of the police and hospitals also suffered outages.

A number of areas in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein were also affected, as well as other cities in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse.

The disruption was reported "very quickly" by network operator Deutsche Telekom, BBK president Armin Schuster told German media group RND.

"We must make sure that the warning system works," Schuster said.

The German government pledged millions of Euros to upgrade its crisis network after deadly floods in July, including installing more warning sirens and establishing a mobile phone alert system.

In September, an issue in the Deutsche Telekom network led to disruptions to emergency numbers lasting 30 minutes.

No indication has yet been given as to the cause of the outage or the consequences it may have had locally.