Last Friday a range of critical government services — from birth certificate issuance and police clearance to ICTA’s website — stopped working. Long lines were seen outside government offices on Monday morning as citizens travelled to obtain services the old, manual way. Later in the day, ICTA released a statement informing the public of the outage.
In rural areas especially, people were forced to travel over fifty kilometres to procure birth certificates. Every day, around 600 people request police clearance certificates via the e-services portal.
The chaos had a common cause: online services are run on the Lanka Government Cloud, which is down.
“The issue arose from the migration of the old system to the new system,” Sanjaya Karunasena, ICTA’s Executive Director, explained on Wednesday. ICTA is the government agency that owns and operates the government cloud, which caters to over 160 government agencies.
The old system was managed by several private service providers. The new system is a managed cloud the government contracted to SLT earlier this year, as learnt from the Digital Economy Ministry. The government cybersecurity team, SLCERT, confirmed that according to the information they had, it was a “technical issue” and not a cyber attack.
The Examiner learns that the contracts of the old service providers weren’t extended for months before the failure. As a result they were not retained during the major cloud migration. Neither the digital economy ministry nor ICTA responded to our request for comment on this, despite multiple attempts.
“A combination of a hardware and software problems led to a sort of freeze state where the data became inaccessible,” Karunasena said. “There was no data loss.”
