Luxembourg probes reported attack on Huawei tech that caused nationwide telecoms outage

Luxembourg’s government announced on Thursday it was formally investigating a nationwide telecommunications outage caused last week by a cyberattack reportedly targeting Huawei equipment inside its national telecoms infrastructure.

The outage on July 23 left the country’s 4G and 5G mobile networks unavailable for more than three hours. Officials are concerned that large parts of the population were unable to call the emergency services as the fallback 2G system became overloaded. Internet access and electronic banking services were also inaccessible.

According to government statements issued to the country’s parliament, the attack was intentionally disruptive rather than an attempt to compromise the telecoms network that accidentally led to a system failure.

Officials said the attackers exploited a vulnerability in a “standardised software component” used by POST Luxembourg, the state-owned enterprise that operates most of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure. The government’s national alert system, which officials had intended to use to warn the population about the incident, failed to reach many people because it also depends on POST’s mobile network.

POST’s director-general described the attack itself as “exceptionally advanced and sophisticated,” but stressed it did not compromise or access internal systems and data. POST itself and the national CSIRT are currently forensically investigating the cause of the outage.

Although the government’s statements avoid naming the affected supplier, Luxembourg magazine Paperjam reported the attack targeted software used in Huawei routers. Paperjam added that the country’s critical infrastructure regulator is currently asking any organisations using Huawei enterprise routers to contact the CSIRT.

Remote denial-of-service vulnerabilities have previously been identified in the VRP network operating system used in Huawei’s enterprise networking products, although none have recently been publicly identified. Huawei’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Luxembourg government convened a special crisis cell within the High Commission for National Protection (HCPN) to handle the response to the incident and to investigate its causes and impacts, alongside the CSIRT and public prosecutor.

The CSIRT’s full forensic investigation is intended to confirm how the attack happened, while the public prosecutor will assess whether a crime has taken place and if a perpetrator can be identified and prosecuted.

The incident has also accelerated Luxembourg’s national resilience review, a process already underway before the attack. Authorities, concerned that a single point of failure had such a dramatic disruptive effect, are now reassessing the robustness of critical infrastructure, including fallback procedures for telecom and emergency services.

Luxembourg is also exploring regulatory changes to allow mobile phones to automatically switch to other operators’ networks during telecom outages, a practice already used in countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States for emergency calls.