P.E.I. government website back up after weekend outage due to power surges

The Government of P.E.I. website, which contains data on hospital wait times, library services and other valuable information, finally came back online late Sunday, two days after issues were first noticed.

Starting Friday evening, a notice on the website said it was temporarily unavailable and directed users to the government’s Facebook page and other social media sites.

In an email to CBC News, a provincial spokesperson said the outage was caused by multiple power surges affecting government infrastructure on Friday afternoon. 

“Surge protection infrastructure was damaged but did the job to protect valuable government IT [information technology] equipment,” the email said.

“IT and transportation infrastructure staff have been working diligently all weekend, sourcing parts and working with their vendors, to ensure the right level of surge protection is back in front of the IT equipment.”

Shortly after 3 p.m. AT Sunday, the spokesperson said the website was expected to be back up soon. It was back in action just before 7 p.m.

Library event affected

The response concerning the P.E.I. outage followed the Nova Scotia government announcing Sunday afternoon that some of its residents’ personal information had been breached as part of a global security issue with a file transfer service called MOVEit.

The email from the P.E.I. government spokesperson said its website issue is “not related to a ransomware attack,” adding: “No information was compromised.”

Back in April 2018, the government website was taken down in a ransomware attack, with the province tweeting at first that it was “a service interruption.”

On Saturday morning, the P.E.I. government tweeted that the Tech N Talk at Summerside Rotary Library would have to be cancelled “due to network issues at the library.”