Companies Office website offline for 24 hours

UPDATED 10AM:  The Ministry of Economic Development's registry sites, including the Companies Office website, are back online today, as of 8.30am, but the ministry had no further word as to what caused the outages.

The sites have been offline for more than 40 hours in total and director of communications Kate Camp said as yet there was no further word as to what had caused the outage, other than that it was hardware related.

She said the ministry was working hard to determine the cause of the problems and that it was aware the outages had been a "huge inconvenience".  Ms Camp said reactions had generally been positive.

"People have generally been very understanding."

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UPDATED:  The Ministry of Economic Development has further shifted the timeline for an update as to whether its registry websites will be up and running tomorrow.

The ministry will update users tomorrow at 8.15am as to whether the websites, including the Companies Office site, will be online on Friday.  However an update on the availability on Friday of the Intellecutal Property Office website is expected before midnight. 

For the ministry's release, a list of FAQs and the full list of websites offline, see this link.

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The companies office website has been offline for 24 hours and a Ministry of Economic Development (MED) spokeswoman said it will not be back online today.

Unavailable since 1.20pm yesterday, the website, which contains details of registered companies in New Zealand, will not be back online today, director of communications for the MED Kate Camp told NBR today.  The ministry would advise at 4.30pm as to whether the website would be available tomorrow. 

Other websites affected by the outage include the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand website, the Personal Property Securities Register and New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals.

Ms Camp said the outage was caused by a hardware problem, but that no further details were available.  She said the ministry had a sophisticated business continuity and backup plan, and that it was working to resolve the issue. 

"We run a pretty tight ship."

She said the ministry would try to make sure the issue did not impact users too much, by being flexible with deadlines and other measures.  This flexibility includes name reservations and incorporations that were due to expire in the last three days now expiring next Wednesday.  The MED said on its website that if the affected websites were down tomorrow, Friday would not count as a working day.