NSW govt data centre goes down after power outage

A number of NSW Health and Service NSW systems were offline on Tuesday after the state government’s Silverwater data centre suffered a power failure.

Reports of issues with NSW Health systems, including the state’s electronic medical record and other corporate applications, emerged on Tuesday morning.

The health.nsw.gov.au website was also down all morning, returning the message “cannot connect to the configuration database”.

After enquiries to NSW Health’s digital arm, eHealth NSW, a spokesperson for the Department of Customer Service told iTnews the outage had been caused by a power issue.

“The NSW government data centre at Silverwater experienced a power issue at 4am this morning,” the spokesperson said.

“This has impacted a number of government systems across the state this morning, in particular NSW Health and Service NSW.”

While technical staff are still investigating the cause of the outage, the spokesperson appeared to rule out a cyber attack.

“Technical staff have been working to urgently bring systems back on line and are investigating the cause,” the spokesperson said.

“It is not believed to be a cyber security incident.”

The spokesperson said while NSW Health had executed business continuity processes, “no patient data is affected by the outage and patient safety is unaffected while systems are rebooted”.

“Service NSW customers should expect some delays to a number of services,” the spokesperson said.

The outage comes days after a system outage at Transport for NSW that was reportedly due to a “malicious hack".

Separately, The Sydney Morning Herald also reported that a series of cyber attacks against the NSW government and critical infrastructure providers prompted Prime Minister Scott Morrision’s cyber attack warning last week.