Parliamentarians, political staffers, and journalists were frozen out of the parliamentary computer network for about two hours this afternoon. No, it was not one of super-sized cyber-viruses, says Heather Bradley, the media relations person for the House of Commons. It was just a good, old-fashioned “hardware” problem. Bradley didn't have more details on the server or other piece of computer equipment that blew up.
In any event, the House of Commons IT staff fixed things up and systems were by and large back online as of about 1700.
Guess this would explain why I couldn't get the Hansard index to load … ?
BTW, the Hansard site (“Chamber Business”) is still experiencing problems as of 7:15 PM. It's reporting that the server cannot be found, which sounds like the hardware is still down.