Manitoba government website crash not caused by cyberattack

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This article was published 14/09/2023 (763 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba government says issues with its network and server infrastructure caused all of its websites to crash on Thursday — not a cyberattack.

The government’s primary website, Manitoba.ca, and all other public government websites and systems were still down by late afternoon Thursday.

Government websites, including courts, the health department and the e-licensing site, which is used to purchase hunting and fishing licenses, were unable to load amid the technical issues, as was the website used to book campsites in provincial parks.

A government spokesperson said Thursday afternoon that support teams were still working on fixing the “unplanned service interruption.”

Late in the afternoon, the spokesperson said there had been no reported impacts to in-person government services or internal application services.

A spokesperson for Shared Health, the provincial health authority, said it had not been affected by the crash.

The government spokesperson did not answer earlier in the day when asked how the crash would affect government services for the public and the work of the civil service.

The spokesperson said there’s no indication the service crash is the result of a cyberattack.

Coincidentally, similar government website crashes occurred in Prince Edward Island, Yukon and Nunavut on Thursday. PEI’s main provincial government website crashed after a cyberattack, that province announced.

According to PEI’s government, attackers were using the so-called denial-of-service tactic, which involves generating a sufficient volume of artificial website traffic to overburden servers.

The Yukon government also said it was hit with a denial-of-service attack on Thursday.

The Nunavut government, which had not confirmed whether it was the target of a cyberattack, told the CBC it was investigating after its main government page crashed.

On Wednesday, some Quebec government web services were affected by a denial-of-service style cyberattack allegedly carried out by the pro-Russian hacker group NoName.

— Staff, with files from the Canadian Press