Clutch of govt sites offline for hours - but it's not a cyberattack

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Grizzles are emerging on social media after a period of "maintenance" for several government websites has extended from a brief lunchtime downtime to hours.

A spokesman for MBIE, which is responsible for the sites involved, told the Herald, "There is a service outage today affecting a number of MBIE business registry platform search functions, including the Companies Register, Financial Service Providers Register, Disclose Register, NZBN Register, and IPONZ public searches.

"The outage is a technical problem, and is not a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

"MBIE has identified a connectivity problem which the site vendors are currently working to resolve."

The spokesman would not immediately identify the connectivity provider or other companies involved.

There was no estimated time for the sites to be back up and running.

The Herald attempted to run a search on the Companies Office around 12.30pm, only to be met with a message that it was offline for maintenance and expected to be operational again by 1pm.

That did not seem the end of the world. Web glitches happen.

But then the offline notice was updated for a 1.30pm return time, then 2pm, then 2.30pm, then 3pm, then 3.30pm, then 4pm before it was dropped in favour of an open-ended message.

MBIE did not issue an alert on Twitter until after 5pm.

took too long for this advisory. https://t.co/p4rPogoJxz

— Till (@francistill) October 29, 2020

Lowndes Jordon partner Rick Shera complained on Twitter that IPONZ (the Intellectual Property Office) was also offline, and had been since at least 12pm - and that "the Incorporated Societies site basically just says go away."