Mystery outage hits government IT system

The Gibraltar Government suffered a major IT outage yesterday that left civil servants unable to work online for close to six hours.
The outage meant many government offices were severely hampered in their work, with personnel unable to access email or use their server connections.
"We were virtually in total paralysis," one senior government official said.
"Most of our work relies on email and our servers. We couldn’t even write a letter because our letterhead is on the server."
The outage appears to have affected the majority of government offices and connectivity was not restored until around 2.45pm.
The cause of the problem was not clear yesterday.
But a government spokesman ruled out any malicious cause.
“It was not as a result of any security breach of the government’s IT infrastructure,” the spokesman told the Chronicle.
“The IT Department is still investigating the matter in order to determine the root cause.”