As the Information Commissioner’s Office website outage enters its second day, the regulator has dismissed fears of foul play by insisting that the issue is due to a technical error experienced by hosting company Eduserv.
According to the firm, its systems experienced an “unprecedented electrical surge” at 8am yesterday that caused damage to some of its circuits.
An Eduserve spokesperson said: “Engineers are on site and continue to restore the affected systems and services. An investigation into the cause is underway. Throughout the outage, we have remained in close contact with our customers, who remain generally understanding and supportive.”
Eduserv could not say when the issue would be fixed, but the ICO said engineers had been working late into the night. It said it remains in constant contact with the company.
“Due to a technical issue experienced by our website host the ICO website is currently unavailable,” an ICO spokesperson said. “Our website hosts are continuing their work to restore the website. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”
A message posted on the site explains that companies and individuals wanting to report a breach could still call the ICO’s helpline on 0303 123 1113.
It adds: “You can access an archive of the ICO’s website on The National Archives website. This includes a copy of the Guide to the GDPR. This information was accurate as at May 24 2018 so some of it may be out of date but it will still be useful. Please note however, you will not be able to use any of the ICO’s transactional services through the archived site, such as paying your data protection fee.”
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