For the sixth year, ENISA publishes the annual report about significant outage incidents in the European electronic communications sector.

This year ENISA and the European Commission received 158 incident reports from NRAs regarding severe outages in the EU’s electronic communication networks and/or services which occurred in 2016. In total 24 countries, including two EFTA countries, reported significant incidents, while 6 countries reported they had no significant incidents. In general, there was a slight increase compared to last year’s statistics where reported incidents reached a total number of 138 incident reports.

Key findings from this year’s incident reporting include:

• Mobile internet continues to be the most affected service: In 2016 most incidents affected mobile internet (48% of all reported incidents).
• System failures are the dominant root cause of incidents: Most incidents were caused by system failures or technical failures (almost 73% of the incidents) as a root cause.
• Malware is causing increasingly long lasting incidents: Incidents caused by malware, although there were not too many of them, had most impact in terms of duration and user hours lost.
• Emergency services are affected by incidents: Same as last year, 20 % of the incidents affected the 112 emergency services.
• Third party failures continue to affect a considerable part of the total number of incidents: 21.5% of all incidents were caused by third party failures, a significant increase from last year (15,2%).

Source: www.enisa.europa.eu

Download the Annual Incident Reports 2016