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UK's non-emergency police and NHS Vodafone systems go titsup NATIONWIDE

101 and 111 collapse due to technical gaffe

Updated Britain's non-emergency telephone numbers for the police (101) and the NHS (111) have collapsed nationwide.

Vodafone engineers are currently attempting to bring the services back to life.

A number of police forces confirmed the outage on Twitter, where they reminded folk not to "misuse" the 999 emergency number just because the 101 number was out of action.

In the past two hours, Humberside's cop shop tweeted that the 101 phone system had buckled across the UK.

In what appears to be a related incident, the NHS 111 number for non-emergency health services was also reporting problems, at time of writing. A recorded message said:

Due to technical difficulties we cannot deliver your call at this time.

However, the NHS was yet to put out an official statement about its technical woes as we went to publication. ®

Update

Vodafone, which – as contractor of the 111 and 101 numbers – makes millions of pounds a year from public reporting of non-emergency crime, gave El Reg this canned statement:

We can confirm that this morning an issue with one of our fixed line call routing systems temporarily affected the services we provide to a number of organisations.

However, our engineers have worked hard to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and services have now been restored.

We will continue to monitor the service closely and will be carrying out a full investigation into the issue. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

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