Zurich (AFP)
The failure of emergency numbers that affected Switzerland last week was linked to a computer failure, said Wednesday the boss of Swisscom in an interview with the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
"We were in the process of performing a maintenance operation on a component of the network on a telephony platform for professional customers", explained Urs Schaeppi, its general manager, citing a failure during the update of a software. , which had a "domino effect".
"We were able to find which component of the network the problem came from and were able to isolate it", added, in the columns of the Zurich daily, the boss of the incumbent telephone operator in Switzerland who apologized to the firefighters and people affected.
During the night from Thursday to Friday, a large blackout affected emergency numbers in several regions of Switzerland, prompting the cantons to quickly make replacement numbers available through a Confederation alert center for manage emergencies as well as through Twitter.
The outage that occurred at night around 11:45 p.m. local time (9:45 p.m. GMT) affected landlines but not the mobile network.
Calls to landlines could be established but were terminated after a few seconds.
The failure had been resolved at 7:53 am.
This new outage aroused the anger of elected officials, who called for a review of the bonus of the boss of the incumbent telephone operator in Switzerland in which the Confederation still holds a majority stake of 51%.
In March, a blackout briefly affected calls to mobile and SMS numbers following a series of other equally brief outages last year, notably in January, February and May.
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