Civil Defence has no explanation for site crash as tsunami loomed

UPDATED:  The Department of Internal Affairs says it still does not know the exact causes of the glitch on Friday, but will hopefully know by tomorrow.

The department today confirmed there had been interruptions to service on Friday but that by 10.30pm it had restored a stable, uninterrupted web service.  "We were aware of this outage immediately and took instant steps to ensure critical information was available through alternative means," senior communications manager Tony Wallace said today.

These included twitter feeds and issuing media releases.  The GNS Science website provided Civil Defence information during the period of interruption, Mr Wallace told NBR, and the department deployed its emergency back-up site on Google sites which was updated with the latest tsunami warning and announced on Twitter to more than 9000 followers, Mr Wallace said.

"We are addressing this issue urgently, with the aim that a resilient website operates at all times," said Mr Wallace.  The department hoped to have an answer to the cause of the outage tomorrow, he said.

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The Department of Internal Affairs does not know what caused the service interruptions to the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management website on Friday, but should know by Wednesday.

The Civil Defence website (along with the Department of Internal Affairs website, which was also carrying Christchurch quake and Japanese tsunami updates) fell over on Friday evening between about 7.30pm and 10.30pm - just the time when thousands of Kiwis were hitting the site looking for estimated times the wave would hit NZ. Many fumed online.

Senior communications manager Tony Wallace said the interruptions, which took the site on Friday, appeared to be intermittent and could have been a combination of things, including traffic or a glitch, but the department did not know for sure.  He said it was in the process of working out what had gone wrong and how to avoid it happening again. 

If a traffic surge was identified as the issue, Mr Wallace said, the website’s capacity would be upgraded. 

“But we don’t know yet if that’s what caused it, it may have been something else.”

Contingency measures were put in place on Friday including continuous Twitter feeds and media releases regarding tsunami status for New Zealand.

Mr Wallace said the department was very concerned about any outages and was working to identify the problems to make sure they did not happen again.  “We don’t want that happening on our civil defence website, obviously.”

He said there was a link to the civil defence website on the department’s page and investigations as to whether the two crashes were connected are under way.

Mr Wallace said he expected to know the cause of the interruptions today. 

“They’re working furiously at it now to try and work out what happened and whether it was one thing or a couple of factors that came together to cause the problem.”