Weather blamed for most communication failures

An EU security agency has found that system failures and natural disasters were to blame for system failures more so than Cyber attacks.

Storms and heavy snowfall was responsible for an average of 36 hours of down time, while cyberattacks were responsible for an average of 4 hours, according to the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (‪ENISA‬).

Switches were the most frequent point of failure (e.g. routers and local exchange points) followed by mobile network home location registers.

In general, hardware failures were the most common cause of "systems failures", followed by software bugs.

ENISA's report, which is a must read for anyone involved in either disaster recovery or telecommunications network management, can be downloaded from their website (PDF).