Stormont suffers 'major problems' from Microsoft outage
Stormont and the civil service were said to have suffered substantial problems from today’s Microsoft outage, more than one department reportedly struggling to get online at all.
Sources told the News Letter that over the course of the morning, there were “major” and “widespread” issues accessing emails across the civil service.
Communications departments in several Stormont departments no longer operate public-facing telephone numbers, however, rendering email the sole method of the press contacting them – something of a hurdle during the global outage.
While at least two branches of the civil service were willing to use messaging services such as WhatsApp to receive and answer press enquiries, another explicitly forbade its communications team from doing so while emails were down.
Both the Executive Office and Daera directed the News Letter to the Department of Finance, which the former pair stated was centrally dealing with all outage questions.
A Finance spokeswoman told the News Letter: “The civil service email has experienced disruption.
“If individuals are trying to contact a government department by email there may be delays in emails being received and responded to.”
Over at parliament buildings, the Northern Ireland Assembly hit issues as well – characterised by a spokeswoman as “some disruption to email services”.
She told the News Letter: “Alternative channels of communication were deployed to ensure essential services remained available.
“Connectivity improved significantly during the early afternoon.”