Latest Ziggo outage hits landline phone service

By Zack Newmark on Monday, 31 August 2015 - 17:56
Ziggo Dome
The Ziggo Dome arena in Amsterdam Zuidoost (photo: Shirley de jong / Wikimedia Commons)The Ziggo Dome arena in Amsterdam Zuidoost (photo: Shirley de jong / Wikimedia Commons)

Network problems continue to plague Dutch telecom Ziggo, as thousands of people took to social media Monday afternoon to complain about a loss of landline telephone service from the provider. Hospitals were among those most harshly hit by the outage, including the AMC, AVL and Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis medical centers in Amsterdam, and the Alrijne and LUMC hospitals in Leiden.

The volume of complaints began increasing between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., according to allestoringen.nl, a site that collects complaints about various IT services. A Twitter account attached to the website suggests the incident that took out phone service began closer to 3:45 p.m.

It is not immediately clear how many customers are without phone service. Calls to Ziggo’s corporate communications office were not connected, and there was no immediate response to an email requesting more information. The telecom did not update their social media accounts with new information as of 5:30 p.m. on Monday.

Troubles for Ziggo began around the time of its merger with provider UPC. Since then, technical problems have led to tens-of-thousands of customers dropping the company's services.

Two cyberattacks against Ziggo in August took out internet service for many of their customers. The company said it learned from the attacks and better prepared itself for trouble in the future. However, the company said they would not refund customers for the time that the networks were down.

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