B.I.T. System Was Down On Wednesday, Affecting Government Departments And Agencies

The Bureau of Information Technology experienced an interruption on Wednesday, causing the disruption of government operations territory-wide. According to a person with first-hand knowledge of the matter, the interruption at B.I.T. affected most, if not all, government websites and email addresses. A prolonged downtime would have possibly affected payroll as well, this person said.

Bryan Administration Communications Director Richard Motta confirmed the interruption to The Consortium Wednesday night, adding that B.I.T. employees were working to fix the problem, which Mr. Motta said would be rectified by Wednesday night.

This person said government websites were down most of Wednesday, and some departments and agencies had difficulty updating the government’s ERP system, which, among other functions, handles payroll.

This person said part of the problem may have been related to DNS, or domain name system. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources. Each device connected to the Internet has a unique IP address which other machines use to find the device. DNS servers eliminate the need for humans to memorize IP addresses such as 192.168.1.1 (in IPv4), or more complex newer alphanumeric IP addresses such as 2400:cb00:2048:1::c629:d7a2 (in IPv6).

It was not clear whether the system was fully fixed as of Thursday morning.