KPN has fixed a fault that left several Dutch hospitals hard to reach by phone, Tweakers reports. The outage was caused by a problem with the cooling system in one of the telecoms provider’s data centres, and the exact cause is still under investigation.
What happened
According to Tweakers, the trouble began overnight. Citing the trade publication CSP Reporter, Tweakers writes that two KPN network nodes went offline during the night of 9 to 10 October. CSP Reporter said it was clear straight away that the cooling had failed. Without it, the room holding the data centre racks became extremely hot, and the heat reportedly made repairs more difficult.
Hospitals across the country felt the effects. Maastricht UMC+ said it had only limited availability on its landline and on the number for its Spoedeisende Hulp, the emergency department. The hospital told patients with an emergency to call 112 instead.
Radboud UMC in Nijmegen also said it had limited availability and gave out an alternative emergency number, 024-3527300. Tweakers reports that the UMCG in Groningen, CWZ in Nijmegen and UMC Utrecht also issued emergency numbers because of the outage. Tweakers adds that many other hospitals were affected as well, without naming them.
KPN reported at 14.40 that the problems had been resolved, and Tweakers rewrote its article after that announcement.
Early reporting on the cause changed during the day. Tweakers first wrote that the cooling system had sprung a leak. In an update at 11.50, the publication said a KPN spokesperson had told it the cause had not yet been established, and that KPN had removed its own messages mentioning a leak. Tweakers corrected its article to match. So the official position for now is a cooling problem, cause unknown.
KPN says it is still looking into how the problem started and what it needs to do to stop it happening again.
Why it matters if you live in Netherlands
For most people this was not a dropped Netflix stream or a slow home connection. The clearest impact reported by Tweakers was on the phone lines of hospitals, including the numbers people use when they need urgent care. That is a practical concern for anyone in the Netherlands, and it can matter more if you are new to the country and still learning how the healthcare system works.
Three points stand out from the reporting.
- 112 remained the fallback. Maastricht UMC+ sent patients with emergencies to 112, the national emergency number, while its own lines were limited. If you cannot reach a hospital in a genuine emergency, 112 is the number to call.
- Hospitals put out temporary numbers. Radboud UMC, the UMCG, CWZ and UMC Utrecht each offered alternative emergency numbers during the outage. If your local hospital is hard to reach during a future disruption, check its own announcements for a temporary number rather than redialling the usual one.
- One provider’s fault can spread widely. A cooling failure at a single KPN data centre was enough to affect several large hospitals in different regions, from Groningen to Maastricht. Much of the country’s communications depends on a small number of physical sites.
Parents and carers who manage appointments or urgent calls for others should note this too. The hospital lines that went down are the ones families rely on when a child or older relative needs help quickly.
Tweakers did not report any effect on KPN’s consumer mobile or home internet services, and the source does not say how many customers outside the healthcare sector were affected. Readers should not assume a wider consumer outage on the basis of this report.
What to watch next
The main open question is what actually went wrong. KPN has backed away from its earlier mention of a leak and says the cause has not been confirmed. The results of its investigation should explain why the cooling failed and why the fault spread to two network nodes.
The second question is prevention. KPN says it is working out which measures are needed to avoid a repeat. Hospitals and other organisations that rely on KPN for critical phone lines will want to know what changes are made, and whether backup routes for emergency numbers will be part of them.
Hospital patients may also notice changes. The alternative numbers issued this week were emergency measures, and it remains to be seen whether hospitals will publish standing backup contact details so patients know where to turn before the next disruption rather than during it.
For now, the lines are back. If KPN publishes its findings, they should show how well equipped the Dutch telecoms network is to keep hospitals reachable when a single site fails.
Source: Tweakers
Sources
- Tweakers: KPN lost storing op waardoor NL ziekenhuizen slecht bereikbaar waren – update 2, accessed 10 October 2026 (archived copy)
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