Airwave Network Disruption affects Emergency Service Communications
Police, ambulance and fire brigade radios went silent this morning during what the Met has called a "significant" power failure.
The Airwave TETRA network, that allows the police, London Ambulance Service and London Fire Brigade to communicate via walkie-talkies, was down for about 40 minutes.
Fortunately it is not believed there were any serious consequences to the failure.
“On Tuesday morning there was a significant but intermittent outage on the Airwave network in London,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said.
“The issue, believed at this stage to be a power failure, has now been resolved and Airwave Solutions Ltd are putting in place measures to avoid a repeat.
“Maintaining our service to the public and officer safety were our first considerations during the outage period, and measures were put in place to ensure it was maintained.”
In a statement, Airwave - whose website contains the epigraph “no risks, just certainty" - said: "We can confirm that at just after 9am the Airwave network in the London area experienced an issue with intermittent communications.
"To minimise disruption to our customers and while diagnostic tests were being run, Airwave took the decision at 9.34am to switch to our standby network in order to restore a full service.
"Switching to the standby network started at 9.38am and full service was restored within two minutes, by 9.40am.
"Over the past year, our resilient network has consistently delivered over 99.97 per cent availability, making an issue of this kind extremely unusual."
