Most of the government’s online services were off-line on Tuesday because of a “hardware fault” in the state’s IT systems, according to a government spokesman.

The Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA), which oversees the government’s IT platforms, said that most of its system was impacted by a fault that had developed earlier in the day on Tuesday.

The service was restored late in the afternoon, after users endured a whole day of problems with email and software programmes.

While the agency is still in the process of identifying the “initial root cause”, a government spokesman said that so far indications show the outage was caused by a “hardware fault occurring on MITA core infrastructure during a planned technical upgrade”.

Sterling job to restore the situation back to normal in no time

“The issue affected connectivity between government departments and core IT services,” he said.

It took more than eight hours to fully fix problems, with MITA announcing a return to normality at around 5.30pm.

Parliamentary Secretary for Financial Services and the Digital Economy Clayton Bartolo, who is responsible for the agency, said MITA did “a sterling job to restore the situation back to normal in no time”.

Although the systems were up and running normally yesterday, the government spokesman said the situation continued to be monitored closely.

MITA’s IT platforms had experienced a similar outage in 2016.