States tech failure in midst of storm

Monday 10 February 2020

In a bit of unlucky timing, a number of States' websites, including part of Guernsey Airport's, went down during Storm Ciara, with a number of people working overtime to fix things.

It meant people trying to follow the latest travel information at Guernsey Airport and Harbour yesterday were unable to, with the airport's bosses having to use social media to update arrival and departure information.

We’re having some technical issues with our online systems, our engineers are working on it. Thanks for your patience, we will let you know when we are back up and running again. pic.twitter.com/a9chDAOPon

— States of Guernsey (@Govgg) February 9, 2020

We have lost our internet connections this morning, so website isn't uploading. We will be tweeting flightinfo shortly. Slot delays at Gatwick currently so some delays likely.

— Guernsey Airport ✈ (@GuernseyAirport) February 9, 2020

It was the part of Guernsey Airport's website which showed arrivals and departures which stopped working, because that specific feature is linked to the States' website, gov.gg, which also went down during the outage. That in turn meant no States staff could use their email accounts. It also affected services like Beau Sejour's website and guernseytickets.gg. 

Explains why I have had no emails today. Hope it’s sorted soon. Presumably these incidents will be recorded under the @AgilisysG contract and KPIs published in future. https://t.co/Rv3YP4j9vf

— Heidi Soulsby (@HeidiSoulsby) February 9, 2020

Everything was back up and running before the end of the day thanks to Agylisis, though. The business is the States of Guernsey's digital partner, and it is leading the Digital Transformation of all of the States' services.

Richard Hanrahan, Agylisis' CEO and the man fronting the digital transformation, tweeted that engineers were on site on Sunday morning trying to fix the problems. Before too long, he tweeted again to say that the fault had been identified and staff were putting a work around in place, and that replacement equipment had also been ordered.

Airport site down so no flight details
Actual weather site down so no wind reports
Harbour site down so no sailing info
Beau Sejour bookings downhttps://t.co/GS2Busaer4 down
Agylisis, is this the extent of your challenge?

— Dudley Jehan (@earlofgsy) February 9, 2020

Mr Hanrahan took the opportunity to point out that the Digital Transformation - which has a £200million price tag attached - would not only bring the States in to the 21st Century, but also achieve more basic things, like stopping outages similar to this from happening in the future.

"Once transformation of the estate is complete these types of issues will decrease materially - in the meantime we will focus on mitigating impact when they occur and continue to work to minimise the likelihood of occurrence," he said.

Pictured: Agylisis's CEO Richard Hanrahan recently spoke to the IoD and the Chamber of Commerce about the Digital Transformation of the States of Guernsey. 

Mr Hanrahan has recently given presentations to both the Institute of Directors and the Chamber of Commerce to discuss the States' Digital Transformation. At its core, Agylisis' task is to put all of the interactions people have with the States - like getting a medical certificate or updating their drivers licence - online, in one place. Mr Hanrahan likes to use the phrase "IT that works", and has spoken about not using technology for technology's sake, but using it to find value. 

Huge thanks to the individuals who’ve worked on this all day - wasn’t straightforward to get to the bottom of https://t.co/ITWNk3wUBM

— Richard Hanrahan (@RichardHanrahan) February 9, 2020