Land titles registry reboots after getting knocked offline
A computer glitch that affected government computer systems last week also knocked out service for Saskatchewan's land titles registry.
The company that provides the registry service, ISC, posted a note on its homepage late Friday night noting that it was affected by a "broad technology disruption" on Wednesday.
"ISC has been working diligently with our technology partners to resolve this disruption and restore access to Saskatchewan's registry services," the notice said.
The company said that as of Friday night its computer systems were operating again but a period of testing and monitoring for stability was needed.
An update was promised for Monday at 11 a.m. CST.
The registry is a key component to real estate transactions.
ISC also provides service for a number of other data banks for the government, including registrations for business corporations and land survey information.
Government systems also affected
The provincial government relies on the same technology and noticed problems on Wednesday morning.
Richard Murray is Saskatchewan's deputy minister of central services.
"We had a pretty significant failure of a storage area network device," Murray said Thursday afternoon, noting that technology experts had been working around the clock to identify the problem and fix it.
He said the issue involved equipment at a service provider known as ISM located at Research Park on the grounds of the University of Regina.
"You could think of it as a couple of big refrigerators full of hard drives. And if one fails, the other one will jump in and pick up the job," Murray explained. "This device should never fail. It's not technically possible for it to fail. But it did fail."
Murray said a little-known software bug, on a separate device linked to the system, was likely behind the failure.
He said there was "zero evidence" to suggest someone had targeted the system.
According to Murray while many government functions were unaffected by the problem, there were disruptions to such things as e-mail and some data-gathering systems. He said some ministries had to do some extra work to catch up on a backlog of data management.
"Impacts were minimized," he said.
