Emergency services disrupted in Norway as Telenor faces fourth outage in recent months

The situation is evolving rapidly. The downtime in emergency services raises critical concerns about lives at stake, according to a researcher from Sintef, Maria Bartnes. The issues with the system persisted for several hours, and as of Wednesday afternoon, not all systems had returned to normal operation. Bartnes pointed out that when it comes to saving lives, every second counts.

The disruption was linked to a power outage at a central facility, and Telenor’s coverage chief, Bjørn Amundsen, expressed a need to thoroughly investigate this root cause, apologizing for the unacceptable situation where emergency numbers were down for hours. This incident marks the fourth time in recent months that Telenor’s emergency lines have faced outages.

Criticism has turned toward the lack of reliable backup solutions within Telenor’s infrastructure. Experts argue that the current redundancy mechanisms are inadequate to properly address failures across the network. Pål Ellingsen, head of the Department of Computer Technology at a university in Norway, emphasized the importance of having backup systems in place for critical services, which should not experience prolonged outages.

The National Communications Authority has deemed Telenor’s repeated failures since September as very serious and unacceptable. They are currently assessing whether Telenor needs to diversify its suppliers to strengthen resilience against such failures. In light of the latest disruption impacting hospitals in Northern Norway, Digitalization Minister Karianne Tung stated that these issues cannot be tolerated, insisting on guaranteed availability for emergency services. Following previous incidents, the government has tasked the Authority with investigating the causes and consequences of these outages to formulate necessary changes.