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Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by jacquesm on Monday June 24, 2019 @12:56PM (#20265640)
It's a huge mess. It's been going on for hours and there is still no status report on how long it will take to fix this. Fire, Ambulance and police are all affected, and half the regular phone network is also out so there are no alternate paths available. Big fuckup, people will die because of this and the post-mortem will be a very interesting read.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by LeonM on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:17PM (#20265904)
What makes you think a telco will ever do a publicly accessible post-mortem after an outage?

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by Zenst on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:57PM (#20267102)
For many business customers they will be contractually obliged to provide a root cause analysis (pretty standard for telcos).

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).

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dredmorbius on Monday June 24, 2019 @03:05PM (#20267220)
s/darn high/darn low/ ?
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by Zenst on Monday June 24, 2019 @03:11PM (#20267278)
Ah yes, my bad - meant that it would be highly unlikely to stay out of public circulation.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by rags2riches on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @01:23AM (#20271412)
High odds are for unlikely events. Low odds means something will probably happen. People often use the expression the other way around.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by jacquesm on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:19PM (#20265930)
> What makes you think a telco will ever do a publicly accessible post-mortem after an outage?

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by LeonM on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:27PM (#20266027)
Like I said, they will have to make one under government pressure, but I bet you they won't publicly release it.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by yellowapple on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:44PM (#20266240)
In an actual democracy, they would be required to release it to the public, since they work for the public (and provide public services/infrastructure) and thus are accountable to the public.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any such actual democracy.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by sambe on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:41PM (#20266919)
Neither do any of the other Scotsmen I know.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by vectorEQ on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @04:16AM (#20272092)
if it's released to government it's in the public domain as the government serves the public... oh wait :D ... democracy never happend :D i remember now
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by foota on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:42PM (#20266220)
Does the Netherlands have something like Congressional hearings? Could come out at something like that.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by sandermvanvliet on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:04PM (#20266475)
Yes, it’s called a “parlementaire enquête” but it’s a fairly heavy handed tool to wield so it’s not done very often
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by jacquesm on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:28PM (#20266758)
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by anigbrowl on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:40PM (#20266903)
Is this based on history or just an attitudinal expression? If the latter, it's not helpful to discourage people when they are in the midst of dealing with a problem.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dontbenebby on Monday June 24, 2019 @05:08PM (#20268495)
In America there tend to be an alternative number ending in 911 (ex: 202-222-0911 or something similar) for each area - it's the # the software forwards a call too. Is there similar in NL so people who were proactive can reach EMS?
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by 0xffff2 on Monday June 24, 2019 @05:37PM (#20268782)
Is this common knowledge? I've lived all over the US and this is the first time I've ever heard of this.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dontbenebby on Monday June 24, 2019 @07:32PM (#20269621)
Yes, every township/locality will have a switchboard. In larger cities it could be zone based. But "911" always has a second # that can directly connect you, ending in 911.

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by zrobotics on Monday June 24, 2019 @10:50PM (#20270764)
Do you know of any place these numbers are commonly available? I can't find anything similar on my local municipalitiy's site, but that doesn't mean anything (the site is terrible). I'm curious though, as the published non-emergency numbers don't follow this pattern.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dontbenebby on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @12:11AM (#20271108)
The police department web site
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by 0xffff2 on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @11:05AM (#20274956)
That's absolutely not true. I've checked websites for every PD I've ever lived in and not one mentions an emergency number other than 911.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dontbenebby on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @04:36PM (#20278647)
I'm not going to out myself by listing my local PD, but I can see a 9 digit number that, when I've called in the past, routed me to dispatch.

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by 0xffff2 on Monday June 24, 2019 @10:12PM (#20270581)
>Yes, every township/locality will have a switchboard. In larger cities it could be zone based.

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dontbenebby on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @12:12AM (#20271112)
It doesn’t always end in 911, that can also fwd to a #.

You can always call the police dept. their # will be on their site

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by oneplane on Monday June 24, 2019 @05:54PM (#20268916)
There are a number of numbers (there is a pun in there somewhere), but most people never use them or bother to look them up. At the same time, a good chunk of the phone network in general was down, so knowing the alternate numbers doesn't do you much good if you can't call at all.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dontbenebby on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @04:51PM (#20278812)
Ah sorry to hear that.

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by Spooky23 on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:14PM (#20270869)
There may be an alternate number, but it doesn’t include 911.

Any string of numbers that includes 911 dials 911.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by 9nGQluzmnq3M on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:37PM (#20270984)
Ending in 911, not just including.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by peterburkimsher on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:43PM (#20271009)
I can confirm. Otherwise it would dial emergency services when calling Taiwanese mobiles, which are in the format +886 911 ... ....
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by dontbenebby on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @05:56PM (#20279426)
Thanks for the correction
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by Jaxan on Monday June 24, 2019 @03:07PM (#20267239)
Last time it happened (7 years ago), two people died.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by MuffinFlavored on Monday June 24, 2019 @04:13PM (#20267934)
What was the root cause 7 years ago?
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by tremon on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @06:24AM (#20272698)
Bad planning. They were doing maintenance on a major link without checking its redundancy.

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by Tsubasachan on Monday June 24, 2019 @03:23PM (#20267421)
And that was KPN as well. Maybe time to give them the boot.
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by rocqua on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @05:26AM (#20272418)
KPN does al government telco stuff because it used to be semi-public. As such, they have a lot of institutional knowledge behind this kind of thing.

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by the_alchemist on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @02:28AM (#20271658)
This might be your first instinct, but a new contractor would have to gain the knowledge KPN did on preventing these outages, there is no guarantee any other company would have better uptime.

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.

Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by mcv on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @03:49AM (#20271973)
Wouldn't it make sense to use several phone companies so you can easily switch to another as backup in case of problems?
Re:Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number by iRobbery on Thursday June 27, 2019 @06:50AM (#20293277)
One person has unfortunately died according to dutch news yesterday.