PMO, many other govt sites went out of service for hours

Govt officials have denied reports that the websites had been hacked

Government websites — including those of the Prime Minister's Office, home and petroleum ministries, and the department of telecommunications — were out of service for many hours on Monday. An official attributed the cause to firewall problems.

The PMO site was restored after over two hours. Some of the others such as DoT took longer. Even the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India site remained out of action for hours.

The recent earthquake in Nepal may have affected services, but there was no confirmation on that. Officials denied the possibility of the sites being hacked. “The data centres of the National Informatics Centre worked to resolve the problem,” a government spokesperson said.

NIC, under the department of information technology, which is responsible for management of government sites, did not elaborate on the cause of the outage. NIC has data centres in Delhi, Pune and Hyderabad, and 30 small centres in state capitals.

Earlier in the day, the URL of the PMO site flashed a message saying “requested service is temporarily unavailable”, it later said “access to this directory is forbidden”. The Press Information Bureau website, which disseminates all publicity material for the Union government, was also down for some time.

However, websites of other critical ministries such as defence, external affairs and finance, and the cabinet secretariat were working normally.