Swisscom boss says sorry for network failure

Neither police, the fire service nor the ambulance could be reached during the eight-hour breakdown. Keystone/Salvatore Di Nolfi

The CEO of Switzerland’s state-controlled telecoms company has apologised for the massive outage of the country’s emergency service lines last week.

“I apologise to the firefighters and everyone involved. The failure shook me a lot. That is absolutely not what we expect from ourselves at Swisscom,” Urs Schaeppi told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday.

The breakdown meant emergency numbers could not be contacted by Swiss callers for eight hours, just as torrential rain was increasing the risk of floods in many parts of the country. Part-time firefighters were called up to their stations to help in emergencies in the early hours of last Friday.

The collapse was caused by a software malfunction when the company was carrying out maintenance work on its telephone platform for business customers, he said.

“A software update led to a malfunction that triggered a domino effect,” Schaeppi said. “Although stability is our top priority, individual failures can occur. Unfortunately, this cannot be prevented,” he told the newspaper.

Schaeppi dismissed accusations that spending cuts or the organisational structure of Swisscom were to blame for the outage. “Our networks are among the best in the world,” he said.

Christoph Aeschlimann, head of the IT, network and infrastructure division at Swisscom, told Le Temps newspaper that the company had to cope with a complex alarm system with regional autonomy.

He said Swisscom was in favour of giving the company a lead role in coordinating the systems and the state overseeing it.

Last week’s nationwide failure of its fixed-line network last followed similar problems in 2020.