The Department of Finance was severely hit by IT bugs in the hours leading up to last year’s budget, with officials locked out of documents and facing frozen systems on overheating laptops.
The issues were such that there was a “significant risk” to the department’s ability to ensure timely delivery of budget documentation to the Oireachtas on budget day, according to its top civil servant, piling on “severe pressure” to meet deadlines.
The issues related to the department’s eDocs system. Its secretary general, John Hogan, wrote to the Government’s Chief Information Officer, Barry Lowry, saying that across the night and early morning before the budget, a “significant volume of issues” arose that “considerably impacted staff”.
He told Mr Lowry that any risk to the delivery of core tasks like the budget was “wholly unacceptable”.
The letter outlines that some officials were locked out of documents, while others were “closing/vanishing” when a user had more than one open.
For some, “the system froze and became non-responsive” with staff facing a “white screen”, while “some staff devices [became] very hot and seemed to slow down/freeze”.
The letter indicates some issues had presented in the weeks leading up to the budget. While there were extra resources and support provided, no resolutions were found and the offered solution was to abandon shared versions being worked on and to start new documents.
From late on September 30th to 5.48am on October 1st, the day of the budget, a document with the economic and fiscal outlook had to be saved and reuploaded five times as staff had been locked out of it. Officials from the economics division could not simultaneously edit spreadsheet files.
Others could not work on the Minister’s budget speech at the same time, adding “hours” to their work. Slides designed to be shared online during the speech were unavailable, as the folder they were in crashed as the Minister spoke.
In response, Mr Lowry apologised and said the issue was a Microsoft update, known as a patch, that had been extensively tested before being deployed without incident across departments. “But we did not anticipate that the patch could have such a negative effect in your area of very high workload,” he wrote.
He said that while a fix had been identified, there was no chance to deploy it in the busy pre-budget period. A spokesman for the office said it is satisfied the issues have now been addressed.