If you’re wondering why Monday afternoon felt unusually quiet in Brussels, you can thank Belgacom, the Belgian telecoms group which provides the phone lines to the European institutions.
For five hours starting at lunchtime, all lines at the European parliament and the Commission, the EU’s executive arm, were severely disrupted, apparently blocking incoming calls from landlines and some mobiles.
An internal e-mail blamed “an incident on the network of one of the Commission external telephony providers”.
It took until 17:33 for a follow-up notification to advise the matter had been settled by Belgacom, a mostly-state-owned Belgian utility that, perhaps not surprisingly, is not known for its customer service.
“Did anything happen?” asked a devious Commission official, who admitted he hadn’t noticed until about four o’clock that something was amiss.
Mobile phones and e-mail continued to work, however, meaning it wasn’t a completely wasted day in the European capital.
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