KPN outage cuts business phones and internet for hours

Overnight from Friday to Saturday 10 October, a large part of KPN's fixed network in the Netherlands went down. Business customers lost their VoIP telephony, and fibre and DSL connections dropped as well. It was mid-afternoon on Saturday before KPN reported the fault as resolved. Many organisations were closed for the weekend, but anyone who was open or needed to be reachable felt the impact straight away.

What happened

According to Dutch IT Channel, two critical network nodes in a single data centre went offline at around three in the morning. The cause was the cooling: temperatures rose, and several cabinets of network equipment failed or were shut down as a precaution. Engineers had to let the room cool down before repairs could begin. In the meantime, KPN rerouted part of its voice and data traffic. Affected services included VoIP telephony, KPN Fiber (FTTO and WEAS), fibre to the home, xDSL and add-on services such as IRMA and OneBase.

The effects were clearly visible. TPO reports that university hospitals in five cities were hard to reach and had to set up emergency numbers. Mobile calls still worked, and the 112 emergency number stayed available. KPN stresses that there was no fire or hack involved, and is still investigating how the cooling failed.

What this means for your organisation

An outage like this is beyond your control, but its consequences are not. If your fixed telephony, internet access and cloud applications all run over a single connection, everything stops at once when it fails. Customers cannot get through, your cloud-based till or ERP system is out of reach and staff cannot work. For organisations covered by the Dutch Cybersecurity Act (the national implementation of NIS2), being able to demonstrate business continuity arrangements is also a requirement.

The lesson is not that you should switch provider. Any supplier can have a bad day. The real question is what happens in your organisation when that day comes.

What you can do now

• Map your dependencies. Which services rely on your fixed connection: telephony, internet, alarm systems, card terminals?
• Add a second route. A 4G or 5G backup on your router, or a second connection over a different network, keeps essential work running.
• Arrange fallback for telephony. Have your phone system divert calls to mobile numbers automatically during an outage, so customers can still reach you.
• Agree who does what. A short plan with contacts, an alternative number and a standard message for your website and social media saves valuable time.
• Test it. A fallback that has never been tried often falls just short when it matters.

How Qteco helps

We monitor our clients' connections and see immediately when a line goes down. Where needed, we set up a mobile backup connection that takes over automatically, and configure telephony so that calls continue on mobile during an outage. Together with you, we decide which processes must keep running and what that requires, so that a fault at your provider does not bring your business to a standstill.

Would you like to know how your organisation would cope if the fixed line failed? Book a conversation with one of our engineers and we will go through it with you.

Sources

1. Storing in datacenter legt netwerk KPN plat — Dutch IT Channel (2026-10-10)
2. KPN-storing: ziekenhuizen in vijf steden slecht bereikbaar — TPO (2026-10-10)
3. KPN-netwerk hersteld na urenlange storing — Cloud Expo (2026-10-10)