Following a network outage shortly after 12:00 pm on May 16, 2023 that affected most of the Northwest Territories, the GNWT has provided an explanation to what caused the incident.
The outage affected communications services and critical servers which rely on network connectivity including, healthcare systems, websites, financial services, human resources, and most noticeably 9-1-1.
According to the GNWT, the root cause was identified as two failed network switches. Upon replacing the two failed switches, most services came back online between 5 and 6 am, and around 11:30 am on May 17, 9-1-1 services were restored.
The GNWT says they are now conducting a review to study the circumstances leading to the failure and examine preventative measures to stop a similar issue in the future.
