Outage in Netherlands knocks out emergency services for hours [telecom]

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Officials have ruled out a cyber attack.

By Amrita Khalid

The Dutch were given a frightening lesson about society's reliance on technology. A major telecommunications outage knocked Netherland's version of 911 offline for a few hours on Monday, reported Reuters. The outage originated on Royal KPN's network and impacted both landlines and mobile phones. It's unclear what caused the event, though KPN has ruled out a security breach. The network went offline at around 3:45 pm in the Netherlands, and was restored roughly four hours later.