Attorney-General suffers 11-hour outage

Utility to investigate cause of Friday power outage.

The Attorney-General's Department suffered an 11-hour network outage last week as a power failure sent its Canberra data centre offline.

A spokesman for the department this week confirmed that Canberra staff were affected by a local power outage between 10am and 9pm on Friday.

The outage took out a number of processes such as email, forcing staff to revert to phone and fax that day.

"We can confirm the AGD IT System was unavailable for much of Friday," the spokesman told iTnews.

"The system went down as a consequence of a power outage in the morning. There were no external factors."

According to the Attorney-General's most recent annual report, 93.5 percent of its workforce of 1,554 were based in Canberra.

Others, based in NSW, WA and Victoria, were not affected by the Friday outage, the spokesman said.

The spokesman declined to disclose details of the department's business continuity arrangements, which were initiated "immediately".

All activities deemed to be "critical functions" continued to be supported during the outage, she said, noting that the department's local power provider had yet to determine its cause.

Canberra utility ActewAGL confirmed that there were "a number of electricity interruptions" on Friday in the suburbs of Belconnen, Fisher, Florey, Fyshwick, Kambah, Symonston, Warramanga and Weston.