The unification will eventually include a head office in Koblenz, Germany, but there will be a design center at the barracks in the Dutch town of Amersfoort.

On top of improving communication in the heat of battle, this will ideally speed the rollout of new technologies and standards. It could bolster their defenses against cyberwarfare, too. This could also help with Europe’s overall defense. It’ll help Germany and the Netherlands better integrate into NATO’s larger operations, and the two hope that other NATO partners will embrace the concept as well.

The ATMs will display information on two types of urgent messages: Amber alerts, when a child has been reported missing and is in immediate danger, and Vermist Kind alerts, which are issued when authorities are worried about the wellbeing of a missing child. In both cases, the machines will display photos of the missing kids along with relevant information about the child that may help to discover their whereabouts. When there isn’t an alert to display, the ATMs will run a secondary campaign that urges Dutch citizens to sign up to receive Amber alerts on their phones.

Amber alerts have been around since the 1990s and have been expanding as technology has evolved. In 2016, the US Federal Communications Commission approved an expansion of the Wireless Emergency Alerts system that allows urgent messages including Amber alerts to be delivered directly to cell phones. Even tech companies have taken to integrate the warnings into their services, with Waze and Google both adding Amber alerts to their platforms.

This isn’t the first time the Netherlands has had to deal with an outage, albeit not for the same reasons — this one was under police control. A cellular network outage in August 2018 knocked out connections to 450 ankle monitors, forcing a similar scramble.

The wearables are frequently helpful for police by giving them a way to keep tabs on suspects and criminals without having to jail them or place officers nearby. This failure underscores a central problem, though: the monitors are highly dependent on reliable connectivity and software, and even a temporary glitch could put public safety at risk.