IT outages ground flights at second largest Dutch airport
By Charlotte Van Campenhout
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -IT outages at the Dutch defence ministry grounded flights at Eindhoven Airport, the Netherlands' second largest, until late afternoon on Wednesday, though there was no indication that the system had been hacked, the ministry said.
Eindhoven Airport shares its facilities with the defence ministry as a civilian co-user of its military section.
The disruption grounded all flights on Wednesday until around 5 p.m. (1500 GMT), the airport said, resulting in the cancellation of over 20 flights.
Additionally, several flights were diverted to depart from Germany's Weeze Airport, 90 km (56 miles) east of Eindhoven. Others were rerouted to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport and Belgium's Brussels Airport, both 125 km from Eindhoven.
A defence ministry spokesperson said all services in the Netherlands dependent on its network might be affected, but did not say how many or which, citing security concerns.
Later on Wednesday the defence ministry said it had found the suspected cause of the outage and was restarting its systems.
"There is no indication at the moment that (the outage) was due to the actions of malicious people," it said in a statement.
Dutch emergency services also reported a national outage that disrupted its standard alarm and communications system, although national emergency numbers were still working.
(Reporting by Charlotte Van Campenhout and Stephanie van den Berg; editing by Angus MacSwan, Gareth Jones, Bernadette Baum and Mark Heinrich)
