Mobile phone service out in Denmark, people stuck on trains: what's the reason?

In Denmark, on Thursday, November 28, one of the largest mobile phone networks, TDC, experienced a failure. People were left without a connection and could not contact emergency services, and some public transport was paralyzed.

This was reported by AR. The company said that the failures were most likely related to an update carried out over the past 24 hours. They noted that there was “no reason” to believe that the incident was caused by a cyberattack.

The outage reportedly left people unable to contact emergency services, forced at least one hospital to reduce non-critical medical care, and prompted security forces in some areas to patrol the streets looking for people in need.

In the evening, TDC Net announced a fix that allowed customers to make calls, albeit with reduced sound quality.

In addition, Danish media reported that train and bus services in some cities were delayed due to signaling problems, leading to chaos at stations and people being stranded on trains.

The Danish Cybersecurity Center and the Danish Military Intelligence Service could not confirm whether the two incidents were are interconnected.

On the social network X, some users suggested that the communication situation in Denmark could be a Russian sabotage. In the comments to a post by German columnist Jürgen Nauditt about the chaos in Denmark, a resident of the country left the following comment:

“The Dane is here. To be honest, I didn't notice. My mobile phone is working fine. But I just checked the local news, and yes. We have these problems. If this is the price of supporting Ukraine, then go ahead. That's all you have, Putin?” – he wrote.

The comments also recalled the recent damages to submarine cables in the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Sweden, as well as between Finland and Germany.