The UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs' (Defra) data center suffered a four-day outage last month.

The power outage, however, is not thought to have caused any delays to data sharing operations at the UK border, reports Civil Service World.

The Automatic Licence Verification System (ALVS) cross-references data from traders of animal and plant goods which has been submitted to HM Revenue and Customs and the Defra. If data can be matched, the system is able to automatically clear the goods for release. It is this system that was affected by the outage.

The ALVS was unavailable between the morning of May 11 and the evening of May 14, which was caused by "a power outage at a privately owned data center that Defra users," said Mark Spencer, food, farming, and fisheries minister.

Despite this, Spencer claims that there was no impact on the flow of goods through the UK border.

Details about the cause of the outage have not been shared. DCD has reached out to Defra for more information.

“Business continuity plans were implemented as soon as the disruption to the service was identified,” Spencer said. “There have been no significant delays to border checks and we continue to protect our high standards of biosecurity in the UK through effective monitoring across all imports. We have contingency arrangements in place for clearance of affected vehicles and consignments at the border, working alongside HMRC and Border Force.”

Defra is a known customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), having previously signed a £20.8 million (~$25m) deal with the cloud giant. The is under the umbrella of a wider agreement between AWS and the UK government procurement agency Crown Commercial Service, dubbed the One Government Value Agreement.