Oxford City Council saw access to its systems disrupted after its hosting provider suffered an unplanned outage over the weekend.

Computer Weekly reports that a “botched platform firewall upgrade” at one of SCC’s data centers led to technical difficulties affecting Oxford City Council’s IT and email systems.

“Our datacentre provider, SCC, was carrying out a regular upgrade to their datacentre equipment when a hardware failure blocked access to all network traffic into and out of the datacentre,” said the council in a now-deleted statement on Twitter. “There are no issues with the systems or data themselves, simply the access.”

Susan Brown, leader of Oxford City Council, also tweeted about access issues. The council announced that systems issues had been resolved on Monday morning.

A spokesperson for SCC told CW the downtime incident had been caused by an out-of-hours routine maintenance task, and it was unclear at this time how many of the firm’s other clients were affected.

“During a routine platform firewall upgrade, scheduled for the weekend of 11-12 December 2021, a minor technical issue resulted in Oxford City Council temporarily losing internet access,” the SCC spokesperson said. “The upgrade was rolled back in order to restore access quickly and there was no impact on systems or data. SCC remained in regular contact with the council throughout the resolution.”

Oxford City Council chose SCC for a five-year data center hosting contract in 2015, with a five-year extension option.

SCC is owned by UK holding company Rigby Group. The company’s Fareham data center offers 4.5MW and 2,800 sq m (30,000 sq ft) of white space over fifteen data halls and two floors.