Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Question 553: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the number of times her Department's website has been offline and inaccessible to the public since 1 January 2006; the length of time her Department's website has been inaccessible on each occasion; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [24765/06]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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My Department's website has been available for approximately 4,221 hours or 98.8% since 1 January, 2006. This level of availability is above the industry average identified by a recent report by Keynote.com. Using a global network of reference sites that monitor Web sites using simulated user transactions the average downtime was 1.41%.

In the last 178 days since 1 January, 2006 the website has been unavailable between the hours of 6pm and 8am 24 times, with an average length of 30 minutes; during the hours of 8am and 6pm the site has been unavailable 73 times, for an average length of 15 minutes. These figures include the downtime experienced last Thursday when the website was unavailable for two hours due to the unprecedented number of hits received on the website when school inspection reports were published on-line for the first time. The Department's webmaster worked quickly to minimise the problems being experienced by members of the public wishing to access the school inspection reports on Thursday morning. Specific domains were provided to individuals so that they could directly access the reports without having to go to the main website first.

The Department's website is a valuable source of information for schools, parents, students and other customers seeking a wide variety of information in relation to education in Ireland. My Department aims to have its website available to the public 24 hours a day 7 days a week. However, it is necessary from time-to-time to take the website off line in order to carry out essential maintenance and development work. Where possible this work is carried out outside of office hours to minimise disruption to customers, such as schools, accessing information on the website.