Government websites down after technical glitches

NEW DELHI: Almost all government websites stopped working since at least 6 pm on Wednesday evening. These include the websites of the Prime Minister's Office, the Cabinet Secretariat, the Press Information Bureau and the ministries of finance, industry, labour and commerce, among others.

The government's chief spokesperson and principal director general of the Press Information Bureau Neelam Kapur told ET that the National Informatics Centre, which maintains the government's information technology system, has identified technical glitches that are responsible for the problem. On Wednesday afternoon too, official websites were tripping intermittently, but by evening they had completely crashed.

“We have been told that the glitches will be sorted out soon. In the meanwhile, we are sending press releases and other official statements to the media through electronic mail," Kapur said, while speaking to ET at 7.45 pm. However, till the time of going to press, only the Prime Minister’s website was back online, while most government websites remained inaccessible.

Some autonomous government bodies that use the dot-com suffix for their websites were, however, not affected by the outage.Later, Kapur turned to Twitter to explain: “No cyber attack or hacking of government websites. Some sites were down due to malfunctioning of equipment. Services are being restored soon.” A government spokesperson said in the evening that all the websites were restored by 9 pm.