Add Swiss IT disaster articles and homepage article cards

Created 6 new investigative articles covering Swiss IT failures from 2020-2024:
- INSIEME: CHF 116M tax software failure (2020-03)
- Swiss E-Voting: Security flaw cancellation (2020-08)
- SECO Corruption: CHF 99M contract scandal (2021-02)
- Juris X: Zürich's 16-year software odyssey (2022-06)
- Swisscom: 8-hour emergency services outage (2024-07)
- Credit Suisse: 3,000 applications integration nightmare (2024-11)

Added article-card shortcode and CSS for homepage layout.
Updated homepage to display all investigations with featured cards.

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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

content/articles/swisscom-8-hours-no-emergency-calls.md

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+---
+title: "Swisscom: 8 Hours Without Emergency Calls"
+subtitle: "When Switzerland's telecom monopoly took the emergency numbers offline during a flood"
+category: "Investigation"
+date: 2024-07-15
+tags: ["Swisscom", "Infrastructure", "Telecom", "Emergency Services", "Outage"]
+---
+
+## The Numbers
+
+| Metric | Value |
+|--------|-------|
+| Duration of outage | 8 hours |
+| Emergency numbers affected | 112, 117, 118, 144 |
+| Weather conditions | Torrential rain, flood warnings |
+| Cause | Software update "domino effect" |
+| Previous major outage | January 2020 |
+| CEO response | "The failure shook me a lot" |
+
+## The Day Emergency Calls Stopped Working
+
+In 2024, during severe weather that was increasing flood risks across Switzerland, Swisscom's network failed. For **eight hours**, Swiss callers could not reach emergency services:
+
+- **112** — European emergency number
+- **117** — Police
+- **118** — Fire brigade
+- **144** — Ambulance
+
+People experiencing emergencies—fires, medical crises, crimes in progress—could not call for help through normal channels.
+
+This happened while torrential rain was raising flood risks. The timing could hardly have been worse.
+
+## The Cause
+
+Swisscom's explanation:
+
+> "A software update led to a malfunction that triggered a domino effect."
+
+The company was performing maintenance on its telephone platform for business customers. Something went wrong. The failure cascaded. Emergency services went dark.
+
+{{< irony >}}
+Switzerland's critical telecommunications infrastructure was taken offline by a maintenance update.
+
+Not a cyberattack. Not a natural disaster. Not sabotage. A software update—the kind of routine operation that happens thousands of times daily in telecom networks worldwide.
+{{< /irony >}}
+
+## The Apology
+
+Swisscom CEO Urs Schaeppi responded:
+
+> "I apologise to the firefighters and everyone involved. The failure shook me a lot. That is absolutely not what we expect from ourselves at Swisscom."
+
+He dismissed accusations that spending cuts or organizational restructuring were to blame:
+
+> "Our networks are among the best in the world."
+
+## The Pattern
+
+This wasn't Swisscom's first major outage:
+
+### January 2020
+A defective component caused the Swisscom landline network to crash, affecting most of the country.
+
+### September 2023
+Thousands of Swisscom customers couldn't access the internet during morning rush hour. The outage lasted almost an hour. Swisscom received 8,000 complaints.
+
+### 2024
+The emergency services outage—eight hours, during a flood warning.
+
+## The Monopoly Problem
+
+Swisscom isn't just any telecom provider. It's:
+
+- Majority-owned by the Swiss Confederation (51%)
+- The dominant fixed-line and mobile provider
+- The carrier of last resort for many services
+- Effectively irreplaceable for emergency telecommunications
+
+When Swisscom fails, Switzerland doesn't have a backup. There's no failover to an alternative national network. The redundancy that exists in other countries—multiple carriers, multiple paths—is limited in Switzerland's concentrated telecom market.
+
+{{< irony title="The 'Best Networks in the World'" >}}
+CEO Schaeppi's claim that Swisscom's networks are "among the best in the world" is difficult to reconcile with:
+
+- 8 hours without emergency calls
+- Multiple major outages in 4 years
+- A software update taking down critical infrastructure
+
+"Best in the world" networks typically don't lose emergency services for an entire workday.
+{{< /irony >}}
+
+## What Should Have Happened
+
+Telecom networks serving emergency services are supposed to have:
+
+### Redundancy
+Multiple paths for critical calls. If one system fails, another takes over.
+
+### Staged Rollouts
+Software updates deployed gradually, with ability to roll back if problems emerge.
+
+### Circuit Breakers
+Automatic isolation of failing components before they cause cascading failures.
+
+### Real-Time Monitoring
+Immediate detection of degraded service, with automatic alerts and failover.
+
+Something in this chain failed catastrophically. A software update affected emergency services for eight hours before resolution.
+
+## The Accountability Question
+
+When emergency services fail, questions arise:
+
+- Who authorized the maintenance during severe weather?
+- Why didn't failover systems engage?
+- Why did recovery take eight hours?
+- What happens to people who couldn't reach emergency services?
+
+The CEO apologized. The company investigated. Reports were written.
+
+But Swisscom remains the dominant carrier. Its monopoly position is unchanged. The structural factors that made this outage possible—concentration, limited redundancy, aging infrastructure—persist.
+
+## The Infrastructure Reality
+
+Switzerland prides itself on reliability. Swiss trains run on time. Swiss watches are precise. Swiss engineering is legendary.
+
+But Swiss telecommunications infrastructure—the system that carries emergency calls—failed when people needed it most.
+
+{{< conclusion >}}
+Swisscom's eight-hour emergency services outage during flood conditions demonstrated that Switzerland's critical telecommunications infrastructure can fail catastrophically from routine maintenance.
+
+The company apologized. The CEO was "shook." The networks are supposedly "among the best in the world."
+
+And yet: a software update took down emergency services for eight hours.
+
+Switzerland's telecom infrastructure is a monopoly with limited redundancy, operated by a company that has had multiple major outages in recent years. The 2024 emergency services failure wasn't an aberration—it was a predictable consequence of structural factors that remain unaddressed.
+
+When the next outage comes—and it will—the same questions will be asked. The same apologies will be issued. And people who can't reach emergency services will hope someone noticed their situation through other means.
+{{< /conclusion >}}
+
+<div class="sources">
+
+### Sources
+
+- [SWI: Swisscom boss says sorry for network failure](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/swisscom-boss-says-sorry-for-network-failure/46784822)
+- [World Radio Switzerland: Swisscom users lose internet](https://www.worldradio.ch/news/bitesize-news/swisscom-users-lose-internet/)
+- [Le News: Switzerland's PostBus scandal - entire management team suspended](https://lenews.ch/2018/06/12/switzerlands-postbus-scandal-entire-management-team-suspended/)
+
+</div>