Finland’s 112 emergency app suffered outage during drone alert

Finland’s Emergency Response Centre Administration has confirmed that the 112 Suomi emergency alert app experienced a technical disruption on Friday morning during a drone alert in the Uusimaa region, according to Yle’s news agency STT.

The temporary outage was caused by excessive load on the app’s backend service and was resolved the same morning. As a result of the disruption, the all-clear notification was delayed.

Some users of the 112 Suomi app may not have received the drone alert at all, for example if the app had not been updated or had not been granted permission to continuously access the user’s location.

The Emergency Response Centre Administration said on Tuesday that older versions of the app placed a particularly heavy load on the backend. As part of efforts to prevent a recurrence, support for older versions has now been restricted. The restriction applies to app versions more than two years old.

“As a result of the restriction, some features, such as notifications, will no longer work. However, transmitting location data will still be possible,” app specialist Sami Suomalainen said in a statement.

The Emergency Response Centre Administration is urging the public to update the app. Early on Friday, a public warning was issued for Uusimaa about a possible drone that may have strayed into Finnish territory. Authorities later announced that no drones had in fact entered Finland.