Swisscom CEO Urs Schaeppi has apologized for the catastrophic outage of the telecoms company’s services last week, which prevented Swiss callers from contacting emergency services for eight hours. The company’s fixed-line network was down across the country for the third time in 2020, following three other outages.
When Switzerland’s whole fixed-line phone network went down in the early hours of Friday morning, part-time firefighters were summoned to their stations to assist in emergencies.
“Please accept my apologies on behalf of the firefighters and everyone else involved. The failure had a big impact on me. At Swisscom, we don’t expect anything like that from ourselves “In an article published on Wednesday, Schaeppi told the Neue Zuercher Zeitung. According to him, the company’s telephone platform for corporate customers collapsed due to a software error while the company was performing maintenance work on it. “A software upgrade caused a failure, which set off a chain reaction,” Schaeppi explained. “Individual failures can occur, despite the fact that stability is our main focus. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable “‘I told the press,’ he said.
(John Revill contributed reporting, and Stephen Coates edited the piece.)/n
