Tas govt services disrupted by data centre outage

The Tasmanian government has promised to conduct a review after a near seven-hour outage at one of the state’s key data centres caused problems on Wednesday morning.

IT minister Michael Ferguson said power at the TMD data centre in Bathurst Street, Hobart was “disrupted” shortly before 4am after an air conditioning unit fault tripped a fire alarm.

TMD is the Tasmanian government’s whole-of-government ICT solutions provider.

The data centre houses the IT servers and networks for agencies including the Department of Police, Fire & Emergency Management, Department of Health and Human Services, Tasmanian Health Service, and Department of State Growth.

Services were restored at around 10.40am.

One of the major impacts was the “initiation of a code yellow protocol at the Royal Hobart Hospital”, which is a code reserved for outages such as to IT equipment.

Ferguson said patient safety was not impacted; it appeared systems were restored before the hospital had to decide whether or not to cancel elective surgery.

However, the ABC reported that additional security had to be brought on to protect medics working in the psychiatric ward as duress alarms could not be used.

The outage also caused traffic delays in the morning peak by disrupting communications between the central traffic signals control system (SCATS) and traffic lights in and around Hobart.

“As a result the department was unable to monitor and adjust traffic signal timing in response to traffic volumes in the morning peak because the traffic lights were operating independently on default settings,” Ferguson said.

“This mode of operation is completely safe and there was no risk to road users.”

Ferguson said that the incident review would be conducted by TMD.