Firm emPSN apologises after major incident affected Lincolnshire schools and councils
A technology firm has apologised after a ‘major incident’ left schools and councils within Lincolnshire without the internet for several days.
Schools using the emPSN network were affected by the long outage - which began at 1.30pm on Tuesday and was not fixed until 11.30am on Saturday.
The Northamptonshire-based firm provides services for 289 schools in Lincolnshire - many of which are in South Kesteven - and this meant teachers and pupils could not access learning resources.
Local authorities - including South Kesteven District Council - also suffered from downtime during last week’s issue, with residents and businesses facing a disruption to services.
A spokesman for emPSN said: “The root cause was identified overnight Friday following extensive investigations by the Nasstar technical teams working closely with their key suppliers, including CISCO, Janet/JISC, BT.
“Once identified the fault was quickly remedied, initially with reduced bandwidth and then following the problem fix with full service.
“emPSN apologises for this service outage and the extended period it took to resolve.
“This is the first such extended failure in over 20 years, it did not have a simple cause.
“I can assure you we will be carrying out a full review with our suppliers; we will be assessing what steps we can take to ensure this doesn’t happen again; and that our resilience is enhanced.”
A Lincolnshire County Council spokesman said that the situation will be kept under review - and that the outage should not have impacted on issues such as safeguarding, where child protection information is logged.
The spokesman said: “All schools have business continuity plans to cover such situations and are never fully reliant on any network connection for their safeguarding arrangements.”
It is understood that the problem was caused by a complex circuit fault. Lincolnshire Police had said there was ‘no indication’ the matter - which affected users across the East Midlands - was anything more than a technical issue.
