Server upgrade downs NZ govt sites

Around 15 New Zealand government websites have gone down due to a failed server upgrade on the weekend.

Websites affected include the Companies Office, Consumer Affairs and a variety of other services for business.

"The outage occurred during preparation work on Saturday evening to upgrade the servers hosting these websites," a Ministry of Economic Development statement said yesterday.

Today, the ministry told ZDNet Australia that it expects to stick to announced targets of restoring the websites by 12pm tomorrow, but would not give any more details on the root cause of the outage.

"At this stage, I would not want to interrupt our technology teams while they are busy working to restore services," said MED spokesman Alastair Stewart, but he added that the ministry plans a further update on progress later today.

Alternative systems of communication have been mooted for customers such as phones, email and Twitter, but the outage has forced the closure of the Patent Office for today and tomorrow. The outage of the Personal Properties Securities Register was also causing problems for firms wanting to check the financial security details of companies. In addition, filing deadlines to the Companies Office have been extended by five days.

Today, Computerworld NZ also reported that the New Zealand Parliament website has suffered an outage, although apparently unrelated to the weekend server upgrade.