Oxford City Council services back online after weekend outage at SCC datacentre

SCC has confirmed {that a} botched platform firewall improve at one in every of its datacentres led to technical difficulties affecting Oxford City Council’s IT and electronic mail techniques over the weekend.

The native authority revealed a tweet – since deleted – alerting native residents on Saturday 11 December 2021 that it was unable to course of transactions by way of the council web site due to an infrastructure fault affecting the datacentre of its IT services companion, SCC.

“Our datacentre provider, SCC, was carrying out a regular upgrade to their datacentre equipment when a hardware failure blocked access to all network traffic into and out of the datacentre,” mentioned the council in an announcement on Twitter. “There are no issues with the systems or data themselves, simply the access.”

The state of affairs meant the council had no entry to its IT techniques and electronic mail platforms, mentioned the assertion.

“The issue has been raised as a major incident, which is affecting all their customers and the supplier is working on a resolution,” it added.

In a follow-up tweet, revealed simply earlier than 9am on Monday 13 December, the council confirmed that standard service had resumed. “Whilst we experienced some issues over the weekend, these have now been fully resolved,” a council spokesperson instructed Computer Weekly.

A spokesperson for SCC mentioned the downtime incident had been attributable to an out-of-hours routine upkeep job, and it was unclear at this time how most of the agency’s different shoppers had been affected.

“During a routine platform firewall upgrade, scheduled for the weekend of 11-12 December 2021, a minor technical issue resulted in Oxford City Council temporary losing internet access,” the SCC spokesperson mentioned.

“The upgrade was rolled back in order to restore access quickly and there was no impact on systems or data. SCC remained in regular contact with the council throughout the resolution.”

As beforehand reported by Computer Weekly, SCC is within the midst of a long-standing datacentre internet hosting take care of Oxford City Council, courting back to 2015.

The contract was initially for 5 years, with the council given the choice to increase it by an extra 5 as wanted, and had an estimated worth of £5m-£13m.