Outage at Amsterdam internet hub affects much of Netherlands

With additional reporting by Zack Newmark. A technical fault at the internet hub AMS-IX in Amsterdam caused online problems in several places in the Netherlands for about an hour Wednesday afternoon. The internet hub, one of the most used internet exchanges in the world, announced they resolved the problem shortly after 1:30 p.m. The cause of the problem, which took hold around 12:00 p.m. was not revealed. Not all of the internet traffic in the Netherlands was affected, as the hub makes use of 11 data centers, a spokesman for the internet hub told Nu.nl. Breakdowns in internet traffic at AMS-IX are not common, the hub said. "In any case, it never happened in the three years I've worked here," a spokesman told newspaper NRC. A cyber attack was not initially ruled out, but the probable cause is human error. AMS-IX is developing a workflow solution to prevent problems like this from occurring again, the spokesman added. Update, 2 p.m., 13 May 2015: Write-through after problem was fixed.