Status: 11/17/2022 10:33 PM
A major telephone outage occurred across Germany on Thursday afternoon, with O2’s mobile network particularly hard hit. Meanwhile, the Hamburg police have warned that emergency numbers have failed.
In the early evening, the fire brigade and the police made it clear that 110 and 112 could be reached in the Hanseatic City. Also in Schleswig-Holstein, several control centers confirmed when asked to reach emergency numbers. Emergency call problems were initially also reported from Bremen and Oldenburg.
Minor limitations at Vodafone – Telekom is hassle free
Problems with the O2 mobile network seem to have affected large parts of Germany. Authorities in Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Lower Saxony, Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia received increasing reports in the afternoon that the emergency number could not be reached. In the state of NRW, disturbances continued late into the evening.
A Vodafone spokesperson said there were only minor restrictions on LTE telephony in its own network. Deutsche Telekom has stated that their network is operating without any issues. On Thursday afternoon, around 19,500 mobile phone users reported problems with the O2 network on the allestoerungen.de portal.
O2: Networks have settled down for the evening
The company said the reason for the restrictions on O2 mobile was an error in the voice transmission server. However, a significant portion of the phone calls may have been transmitted through other servers. “The first actions taken by our technicians stabilized the networks,” a company spokesperson said in the evening. Later in the evening the problems were said to have been largely resolved.
Calls using apps like WhatsApp were still possible via data transmission servers.
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