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NHS and POLICE non-emergency services GO DARK after Voda switch failure - source

Nationwide network cockup

The collapse of Britain's non-emergency telephone numbers for the police (101) and the NHS (111) last week was due to a switch failure at Vodafone, The Register understands.

The outage affected a number of Vodafone's customers on 22 November, including First Great Western, Barclays and RAC.

A source told El Reg the outage occurred because the network switch failover did not kick into action, causing the entire system to go down rather than transfer to the company's second back-up network.

A number of police services confirmed the network cockup early on Saturday morning, with engineers finally fixing the problem at 1pm.

The RAC described the outage as a "catastrophic failure" of Vodafone's telephone equipment.

Vodafone said in a statement would not confirm or deny whether the cock-up was due to a switch failure, but said it has "identified the issue".

"Our engineers have been working closely with our vendor to investigate the underlying issue for the fault on Saturday," it said.

"We will implement the fix to that issue once we have completed our testing and are confident we can resolve the issue effectively. Although we do not anticipate any further outages, we continue monitor the service closely and have a comprehensive risk mitigation process in place.” ®

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