NICOSIA (Reuters) – Cyprus’s state apparatus was knocked offline on Tuesday after a water leak in a room housing central government servers, forcing an emergency shutdown.
The leak, discovered in the basement of the Finance Ministry on Monday afternoon, also knocked out the state telephone network, but that was back up on Tuesday morning, officials said.
“For security reasons servers were shut down to limit and restore any damage,” the Cypriot finance ministry said in a tweet.
A range of government departments from inland revenue to customs and the social security department were offline, it said. Visitors to state offices on Tuesday were told services were limited.
The government servers were in a finance ministry basement, a level below a floor holding a water tank which overflowed.
Cyprus’s deputy ministry of research, innovation and digital policy, which was also forced offline, said in a Facebook post it had launched an inquiry into the incident. Authorities had decided to move the servers to another location in Nov. 2022, it said.
Authorities have had a string of digital misfortunes this year. Last month the island’s land registry department was knocked offline by hackers, and some days ago the country’s Open University was also targeted.
(Reporting by Michele Kambas; Editing by David Holmes)
