Ankle monitors are useful for keeping track of people who are under house arrest. It means that police will know at all times where the person is, and is much more efficient than sticking a couple of officers on them all day. However, the ankle monitors need to work in order for it to be effective, which for a brief moment wasn’t the case.In a botched update made to the police ankle monitors over in the Netherlands, it seems that it ended up crashing hundreds of these monitors in the process. The update caused traffic from the monitors from being sent back to the Department of Justice’s DV&O control rooms. This meant that while it was down, police had no way of keeping track of suspects who were released on bail or who were under house arrest.
This did not mean that those suspects got a free pass, and as a result of the crash, Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security had to preemptively arrest and jail some of their more high-risk suspects. According to Dutch officials, “As a result of a software update, a disruption occurred in data traffic during the electronic monitoring of ankle bands yesterday. The system is now operational again. All ankle strap wearers are in view. We are working hard to make the system 100 percent stable again.”
As ZDNet points out, this is actually not the first time that this has happened, as back in 2018 a mobile telecom outage also resulted in the system going down for a day.