GNWT’s website down for hours over ‘defective hardware’

The NWT government’s website was inaccessible for hours on Thursday before some webpages began to reappear at around 4pm.

Neither the main GNWT website nor the sites of related agencies could be accessed for much of the day, a problem affecting the likes of Elections NWT, the Legislative Assembly and even the territory’s online phone directory.

All reported an “address unreachable” error.

Territorial government email access was also understood to be affected, though the full extent of the outage wasn’t clear.

Todd Sasaki, a spokesperson for the NWT’s Department of Finance, said by phone that the territory’s Technology Service Centre had “identified defective hardware” preventing access to websites and causing email server problems.

In an internal update, the GNWT said there was no immediate estimate for the time required to restore services. At 4pm, webpages appeared to be accessible again but there was no formal update regarding the rest of the territory’s systems.

The NWT government’s website was hit by a suspected cyberattack in September, a disruption that occurred while the territory was attempting to organize repatriation flights for returning South Slave evacuees.

At that time, the websites of multiple other provincial and territorial governments were affected.

On Thursday there appeared to be no such trouble on any other jurisdiction’s website. Whether any form of cyberattack was involved in the lates disruption remained unclear.

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