News Burst:UKonline portal offline

New government portal UKonline.gov.uk launched on Monday is currently experiencing an outage and displaying a temporarily unavailable message on its home page.

The government launched the pilot version of its UKonline portal as part of its initiative to get all government services online by 2005. An additional teething problem prevents the portal from offering any transactional services due to inadequate security measures available on the site.

The citizens portal links to 1000 government Web sites, providing a search engine that is intended to direct the public to the relevant government service 24 hours a day.

The Cabinet Office is refusing to comment on the issue.

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