Belgium: Belgian emergency services numbers go offline after Proximus data center fire

Last week, a fire in a data center operated by the Belgian telecommunications company Proximus temporarily disrupted phone services for contacting emergency services.

Last Wednesday morning, emergency numbers 112 (firefighters and ambulances in a hazardous situation) and 101 (police) were inaccessible for less than thirty minutes. According to the local press, a fire in a Proximus data center at its Evere facilities in Brussels caused the outage. The fire was discovered at 9 a.m., prompting a brief evacuation of the personnel. Normal operations resumed at approximately 10:30 a.m.

The National Crisis Center of Belgium, compelled to activate three alternative emergency numbers per province during the outage, reported that Proximus was still investigating the cause.

Proximus maintains data centers in the Evere and Machelen areas of Brussels in Belgium for its own needs and local IT hosting. HCL Technologies announced in 2021 that it would administer the private cloud infrastructure of Proximus. This year, Proximus and Google partnered to offer cloud services in Belgium and Luxembourg.