Investigation to determine cause of IT failures at gov’t agencies

Six government departments affected by technical problems that resulted in a shutdown of their computer systems earlier this week are now back on stream, and an investigation is underway into the root cause of the problem.

While he was not in a position to list all the departments at this stage, Minister of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology Davidson Ishmael told Barbados TODAY on Friday evening “we have pretty much gone back live”.

“The vast majority of the issues that would have occurred yesterday – or rather, I should say, the actions taken to stymie the issues – have pretty much been reversed. . . . All the government services are on stream to the best of my knowledge. I have not got any reports of anything being down still,” he reported.

However, Ishmael, who has been tasked with leading the island’s industrial and technological transformation agendas, said the ministry has launched an investigation into the root cause of the IT challenges.

“I would say that the situation, as of yesterday afternoon, was well contained to avoid any significant fallout, or serious fallout. The team is investigating as we speak to find out exactly where the issues would have commenced, and that investigation would probably take another week or so,” he disclosed.

“It only really directly impacted six government agencies, departments; and the extent of that impact is still being investigated. But at this point in time, I would say that the system was shut down as a precautionary measure so that we would be able to contain the issue and pretty much identify what was occurring and then start to resolve, which we did. By yesterday evening we had most of the Internet services back up for government and things have been pretty much back to normal as of today,” the Minister added.

On Thursday afternoon, the Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS) issued a notice informing the public that due to the current outage being experienced by all Government IT systems, only urgent COVID-19 testing would be facilitated at Government testing sites for the remainder of the day.

However, Minister Ishmael said he was not aware of the notice and could not say if that was linked to the same technical problems of which he spoke. (EJ)