Major outage hits Dutch telecom provider Odido; Cause still unknown

Two separate outages knocked the Odido mobile network offline across many parts of the Netherlands on Wednesday. The cause of the major disruptions was still under investigation on Wednesday afternoon. The company is headquartered in The Hague, where dozens of international political leaders gathered for the NATO Summit.

Tens of thousands of complaints were logged by the website, Allestoringen, in regards to the second outage from around 12:30 p.m.. The trouble mainly affected the telecom provider's mobile network, including access to calling and data services. Customers of subsidiary brands Ben and Simpel also had difficulties, according to Allestoringen.

The issue was identified and resolved by about 3 p.m., Odido confirmed, with services gradually returning to online status. The telecom service said it did not suspect a cyberattack as being the cause of the afternoon disruption.

"We have no reason to assume that so far," a spokesperson said on Wednesday afternoon. Odido is restoring service for all customers "in a controlled manner," which was expected to take an hour.

An earlier disruption affected Odido mobile services starting around 9 a.m. on Wednesday, impacting many users in the Netherlands including those at and near the NATO Summit. Once the issue was resolved nearly three hours later, a representative also said there were no indications of a cyberattack. Odido recently contended with several problems on its network on various dates.

The company said its solution to the morning problem caused an "overload" of other systems, triggering the second malfunction. Odido implemented "bypasses in the systems" to return service to working order.

Still, multiple Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were launched against websites in the country this week, some of which were attributed to a group known as NoName057(16). The pro-Russian collective often targets websites in coordinated attacks affecting countries on a rolling basis, particularly those viewed as being opposed to Russia in some way.

An act of sabotage was also considered as one possible cause to a significant rail disruption on Tuesday that made it harder to access Schiphol Airport from various cities. Police were also considering whether copper thieves were responsible for the problem. The possible criminal incident allegedly caused cabling to catch fire, resulting in the daylong issue.

Spokespersons for the Ministry of Justice and Security and the Ministry of Economic Affairs refused comment on Wednesday, referring questions to the telecom providers. They did not want to speculate on a possible cause of the outage.

"We are in close contact with the providers," said an Economic Affairs spokesperson. They emphasized that this is the case with every outage.

Apart from Odido, clients of both KPN and VodafoneZiggo also reported problems shortly after noon, but representatives for the two telecom providers denied they were affected by an outage. They believe their clients may have had trouble reaching people on the Odido network. This may have led to the inaccurate assumption that they faced a problem with their own provider.