There were problems with the staff email service on Saturday 29 August which resulted in the service being very slow and, for many, effectively unavailable via some connection methods (e.g. Outlook).

This was due to electrical supply work that was planned over the weekend, which meant that the power was switched off in one of our data centres.  We knew this was happening and moved all services to our main data centre.  This meant that our systems were “at risk” and we advertised that via our status page.

Also, on Saturday there were problems with some of the staff Exchange email servers resulting in slowness and connection problems.  As we had staff on standby for the power work they worked on these incidents during the day on Saturday.  The Exchange mail service was intermittent and slow during the afternoon but was back by about 7pm.  There was a problem with the Global Address Book service which was not restored until Tues 1 Sept.

Please check the IT homepage for more detailed breakdown and warnings on similar incidents from this point on.  We apologise for these outages and we will review how we manage planned shutdowns relating to essential power maintenance

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