ENISA looks at telecoms downtime in Europe during 2020
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- Published: Tuesday, 27 July 2021 08:59
ENISA, the EU Agency for Cybersecurity, has published its annual report into incidents of telecoms downtime in the region in 2020. This highlights that human error based incidents are on the rise.
The annual report looks at 170 incidents that were reported in 2020, and reveals that faulty software changes and/or updates constitute a major aggravating factor in terms of impact, resulting in 346 million hours lost which is equivalent to 40 percent of the total number of hours lost. System failures continue to dominate as the most frequent cause of incidents leading to severe adverse impact.
Other key findings include:
- The total user hours lost, derived by multiplying for each incident the number of users and the number of hours, was 841 million user hours.
- The total of incidents caused by human errors or third-party failures remain similar to the levels seen in 2019.
- The multiannual trends show that although system failures continue to be the most frequent cause of incidents (61 percent), these incidents are decreasing in size.
- The analysis also reveals that incidents cause by human errors have been on the increase between 2016 and 2020, reaching 26 percent of the total number of incidents.
