Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation’s Emergency Number

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — A major telephone outage hit the Netherlands on Monday, taking down the country’s emergency number and leaving many businesses and municipalities unreachable by phone for hours.

More than three hours after it began, telecom provider KPN was still searching for a solution as emergency services issued alternative numbers to the national alarm number 112. which stopped working because of the outage.

“We are working very hard to solve it but cannot yet indicate an end time,” KPN spokeswoman Victorina de Boer said in an email to The Associated Press.

The outage affected both fixed landlines and mobile services. On its website, KPN said that mobile calls were possible on the older 2G and 3G networks if customers turned off 4G on their handsets. Mobile data and fixed internet also was still working, meaning that calls using services such as Skype and WhatsApp were still possible.

Police sent officers onto the streets so that people could approach them for emergency help. and issued an alternative emergency phone number an hour after the outage began around 4 p.m. (1400 GMT).

“We’re appealing to everybody who wants to report an emergency and needs help to … go onto the street. Police officers with walkie-talkies are taking to the streets as much as possible so they can be spoken to,” police spokeswoman Suzanne van de Graaf told national broadcaster NOS.

Some police forces advised people to use social media if they need to contact emergency services, while others advised people to go to public buildings for urgent help.

Justice and Security Minister Ferd Grapperhaus said in a tweet that he was “in direct contact with KPN” about the outage.

The cause of the outage was not immediately clear.