Widespread outage of German emergency service numbers

German emergency agencies reported early on Thursday that calls made to emergency numbers of the police and fire department were not going through.

The Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) sent an official notice on Thursday morning, alerting citizens that the 112 and 110 numbers were down.

Police in the capital city Berlin made similar announcements on social media platform Twitter, saying that emergency calls to 110 have "completely failed" and said communication would be sent as soon as the number was working again. 

The BBK told DW that the emergency numbers were later restored, but the cause of the disruption is still unclear. 

"There was a disruption in the emergency numbers early this morning. This has since been resolved. Error analysis on the part of Telekom (the company that manages the network) is already underway," the BBK said. 

Major cities affected

According to the BBK, emergency numbers had not been working in major cities including Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt.

Police in Frankfurt however have since announced that the numbers were up and running again.

By 6am UTC, services had been restored in other parts of the country.

States that were affected include Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.

People wishing to make emergency calls were advised to call local police stations directly.

The cause of the outage is not yet known.

fb, kb/aw (AFP, dpa)