Council computers go offline

GOLD Coast City Council says a crash of their computer systems yesterday is not linked to a virus or other security threat.

The city’s website, as well as email and other business systems, went offline just after 3pm.

A city spokeswoman said the outage was due to an issue with “the configuration of our firewall” and did not know when it would be rectified.

The council replaced the DNS Gateway error message with “Gold Coast City Council websites are currently undergoing scheduled maintenance.

“For after hours Council emergencies, please Call 1300 GOLDCOAST (1300 465 326) or 07 5582 8211.

“Any critical alerts and notifications during the maintenance period will be posted to the Council Facebook page. Please visit Council Facebook page via this link — www.facebook.com/cityofgoldcoast.”

The council signed a $150 million ICT contract with Fujitsu in 2015.

The major outage comes as workers at Hobart’s Cadbury chocolate factory were placed on cleaning duties, with production halted due to a global ransomware attack.

The factory’s owner, USbased food giant Mondelez, confirmed it had suffered a global computer outage.