Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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250. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the duration for which his Department's website (details supplied) was unavailable; the reason it was unavailable; the nature of the work that was carried out while the website was down; if content from the website was removed or added before, after and during the outage; if so, the changes made; the persons responsible for rectifying the issue; if a third party was involved in the fix and-or solution for the website; if costs were incurred; the contingencies in place for when the website is not available; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [43087/18]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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My Department’s website, www.dccae.gov.ie, was unavailable to the public during a period from Thursday 11 October 2018 to Saturday 13 October 2018.

As part of the normal course of anti-virus and operating system updates, the website encountered technical difficulties which resulted in issues in accessing the site. The web application needed to be rebuilt as a consequence of these technical difficulties and this work was completed on Saturday last.

Updates to the content of the website are carried out as part of a two-phase operation. Departmental editors add and update content on a secure internal site and the updated content is automatically duplicated and deployed to the public facing server.  It was this public facing site that became unavailable. The internal site was still operational and available for content editors. When the public-facing server became available again these updates were pushed out and made available to the public immediately. During the outage, pages were updated on 11 Octoberfor the National Broadband Plan. After the outage, pages and images were updated on 16, 17 and 18 Octoberrelating to areas including the Natural Resources area, Press Releases and Publications. There was no update from 12 to 15 October.

The Department’s IT Unit rectified  the issue and no third party was involved in this work. The fix was to rollback and rebuild the external website and synchronise updates from the internal site. No additional costs were incurred.

The Department uses multiple other multimedia channels to communicate with the public including Twitter, emails and GSI.ie.