In Europe, Estonia is considered one of the pioneers of digital administration - and has extensively protected its computer systems against attacks from the Internet. But dangers also lurk out of the animal kingdom: Because rats had gnawed a cable between two state data centers in the capital Tallinn, several online citizen services in the Baltic EU country were temporarily unavailable.
Affected were, inter alia, the prescription system for digital prescriptions and the website of the lottery company "Eesti Loto", as the State Information Services Office announced. The several hours lasting disturbance is now fixed.
"It was a fiber-optic data cable that is widely used in telecommunications, rodents have damaged it in several places, and we had to replace tens of meters of cable to fix the problem," official Kaido Plovits told Estonian radio on Thursday. During the disruption on Wednesday, a part of the data exchange was automatically moved to another main line, the rest was changed over manually. "The entire state network has not collapsed, just a small part of it, whose backup has not yet been automated," said Plovits.
In Estonia, which likes to call itself "E-Estonia", the approximately 1.3 million citizens in everyday life can do almost all administrative procedures online with a few mouse clicks. The baltic state has already relocated many citizen services and public offerings to the internet. Since 2005 Estonians can also vote online. According to statistics from the European Commission, 78.1 percent of the administration in Estonia is already digitized. Germany is below the average of the EU states - at 50.2 percent.
- An interview with President Kersti Kaljulaid about the advantages of electronic administration you can read at SPIEGEL + : "What Germany can learn from Estonia"
