Telenor, one of Norway’s leading telecommunications providers, is now under the close supervision of the National Communications Authority (Nkom) following a significant disruption to emergency call services last week.
On Thursday evening, the public was unable to reach the police’s emergency number, 112, for three hours—a critical issue that also impacted mobile customers of Telia and Ice. The 112 number is essential for residents and serves as the international emergency contact for visitors to Norway.
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The outage, caused by a technical error on Telenor’s part, has prompted Nkom to launch an investigation to determine whether the incident could have been prevented with appropriate security measures in place.
Svein Scheie, Nkom’s Security Director, stressed the seriousness of the situation: “We take it very seriously that such an error occurs, which affects the public’s ability to call emergency numbers. We will, therefore, go through the course of events and check whether the requirements for proper security have been followed. We must do what we can together with the actors to prevent a similar incident from happening again.”
The findings from this investigation are expected to be released by the end of October 2024.
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Notably, several telecommunications companies have experienced similar outages, often leading to investigations that have revealed procedural flaws or a series of misfortunes that exacerbated the situation.
The UK’s Ofcom fined BT GBP 17.5 million for being “ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophic failure of its emergency call handling service” during an outage in June 2023. That disruption, which lasted 10.5 hours and affected 14,000 emergency calls, was traced back to a configuration error compounded by human error and inadequate disaster recovery protocols.
Similarly, in March 2024, Ofcom launched a separate investigation into Vonage, a cloud communications provider, after its business customers experienced disruptions in emergency call services in late 2023.
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