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Comment by huis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure you can call this a big fuckup, we will have to wait for news about the cause.

Yes it is bad, very bad. But I'm sure they got all the redundancy in place and thought about so much more than we can imagine. But even then there might be some extreme event that will throw 'soot in the food'.

I think it is just great how this event is handled. Almost everybody I know knows the alternative alarm number. Police is in the streets so you can walk to them. And as far as we know there are no looters taking their chances.

So yeah, bad, but we have to wait before we can mark it as big fuckup.

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This is not just some internet uplink, it’s the national emergency number. And on top of that, they sent the wrong phone number with the NL Alert.

Whatever the post-mortem will say, if the national emergency number goes down, it’s a huge fuck-up. People will die because of this.

Didn't even receive an NL alert. My collegue sitting next to me did. I'm on KPN so I guess the alert depends on the specific provider.

This event should not have happened in the first place and it was demonstrably mis-handled in several critical ways.

The fact that the police has responded in the proper way has nothing to do with how KPN has handled this so far and it immediately puts in question the retiring of the siren system used for emergencies, which for cost-cutting reasons has been replaced by the national mobile phone alert system, which apparently does not work when you really need it.

Wondering what you mean with: "demonstrably mis-handled in several critical ways."

Other than the outage itself, not much has happened?

Also, what would a siren help in this regard? Can you play the new phone number in morse on the airhorn siren?

The parent is questioning the reliability of the mobile phone alert system as a replacement for the sirens: it has failed for many people (and has so in the past), and as such one can assert that it cannot replace the siren.

> demonstrably mis-handled in several critical ways.

- No fall-back system in place.

- Alternative alert system did not work.

- Alternative alert went out with the wrong information.

That seems plenty to me.

As far as the siren is concerned: the general alert system is meant for serious threats to public safety, it does not require 'a new phone number in morse', the output is a single bit: siren on: stay indoors, close doors and windows, wait for all clear sign (three short bursts on the siren).

I'm not so sure about always "stay indoors" part - in particular in case the dams leak and half of the country is about to be under water.

I guess depends on the height of your house - though in quite a few places even rooftop might be below or close to sea level.

Those are pretty far down on the likelihood scale, though we have had instances of that, especially near river dikes in the last couple of years. We do not have a lot of dams here.

The more likely cause for such an alarm is chemical pollution from either an accidental release or a fire. Their old use was for air raids but those are even more unlikely (at the moment, of course this can change).

The actual instruction from the government is:

* Go inside

* Close doors and windows

* Listen to the emergency channel

* Know when it is safe to go outside again

Sirens are sunsetting, but still operational until 2020.

But the last two are not KPNs fault. They don't handle the NL alert at all, that's the government.

Also: there was literally no reason at all to stay inside. Sounding the national airhorn alarm because 112 is unreachable is a horrible decision.

> But the last two are not KPNs fault.

Agreed, but 112 not being reachable definitely is. KPN made a big stink about it at the time how other 'crappy' providers could not be trusted to deliver a thing of such national importance and so they got to do it exclusively rather than to have multiple redundant systems by different providers. I'm sure there will be some second guessing of that decision now.

Agreed that sounding the national alarm over this would be an overreaction, as is the fact that they used the national alert, lots of people are going to disable it as a result of this and that will make the system that much less valuable.

Glad you agree now. Your comments yesterday make it seem you were quite stressed out from all of it.

No, I just think that if the national alert system is activated that it should work as advertised, deliver each alert once and that everybody should receive it.

As it was some people got no alerts, others got nine and the information dispensed through it was faulty. That's pretty fucked up.

>"demonstrably mis-handled in several critical ways."

Sending out an incorrect alternative emergency number on the NL-Alert system and not correcting it for about an hour is one instance.

Huh? I swear I heard the siren test at the start of the month, has it been phased out?

Not yet, they intend to phase it out.

https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/4344848/luchtalarmsirenes-verdw...

National telephone networks 'solved' redundancy, what, a century ago?

A similar problem is happening in the UK; airports trying to centralize air-traffic control to off-site locations to save a few pennies.

Could be, but we don't know yet.

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