Flights have been grounded and police officers were forced to communicate by text while on duty as a network outage at the Dutch ministry of defence caused major IT failures across the country.
The extent and cause of the problems are not yet known, but a spokesperson for the Dutch defence ministry confirmed the issue can be traced back to one of their networks that is also used by other parts of the Dutch government.
Travellers at Eindhoven – the Netherlands’ second-largest airport – were stuck since early morning with flights from budget airlines Ryanair and Transavia cancelled.
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“There is no air traffic at all and we have very little information about the cause,” spokesperson Judith de Roy said.
All flights at the airport were grounded until at least 5pm local time (4pm UK time), resulting in at least 14 cancelled flights.
Some flights were diverted to Germany’s Weeze Airport, about 90km from Eindhoven, as well as Schiphol and Belgium’s Brussels Airport – both around 125km away.
The airport also serves as a military airport operated by the Dutch defence ministry. The country’s largest airport, Amsterdam’s Schiphol, has not reported any problems.
The alarm and the communications systems for emergency workers were also affected.
The coastguard said they were not reachable by phone or radio while police officers used mobile phones and text messages to stay in contact rather than their normal communication system.
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Telecom company KPN was also experiencing a major outage with its mobile service, but the company said it was unclear if the problem was related to the issues at the defence ministry.
The Dutch national cybersecurity centre said it is not yet known if the outage is a result of a cyber attack. The defence ministry said it was unclear how long the outage may last.
