Government and municipal services, the Chamber of Deputies, the gendarmerie, the coast guard, vaccination centres, planes grounded for several hours, until the evening, at Eindhoven airport, where thousands of passengers were stranded: the Netherlands experienced a dark day on Wednesday 28 August due to a computer failure that began on Tuesday evening and whose cause is still not clearly identified. The national police were able to resort to a “plan B”, which involved the use of mobile phones.
The problem is believed to be caused by an interruption and a faulty upgrade of the fibre optic network of the Netherlands Armed Forces Integrated Network (NAFIN), on which the C2000 emergency communications system used by several government services depends. A large number of them use this complex channel architecture, with a central core and fourteen branches, to exchange sensitive information.
However, the authorities refused to confirm that the C2000 was indeed the cause of the difficulties encountered on Wednesday in half the kingdom. The impact on Einhoven airport, although Amsterdam-Schiphol was not affected, could be explained by the fact that it has a military part and that there civil air traffic is subject to joint control with the army.
The central role of the Ministry of Defense
The Ministry of Defence, which is therefore at the origin of this serious disturbance, said on Wednesday evening that it would provide more information when it had “a complete vision” The authorities, after some hesitation, ruled out the hypothesis of malicious intent. Several computer experts, who quickly examined the characteristics of the failure, also ruled out the idea of sabotage. “A hacker with access to such a sensitive network would not cause the system to collapse but would examine what is inside.”He confided to the Dutch newspaper on Wednesday NRC Mendel Mobach, cybersecurity specialist.
David van Weel, Minister of Justice, said the country should certainly get used to such failures, “The question is how quickly we can react,” Prime Minister Dick Schoof, for his part, spoke of a situation “terribly boring” but, according to him, impossible to completely prevent.
Statements that earned him criticism from the socialist and environmentalist opposition: “No, you don’t have to settle down, but make sure you are resilient and independent.”wrote MP Songül Mutluer on X. Like many others, the country had already fallen victim last month to the gigantic disruption caused by the update of the Falcon Sensor antivirus program, the software developed by the American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
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