[Terpelaziun] Minister of Technology (9/6)

[Breneir Tzaracomprada]

Mr. Speaker,

This enquiry is for the Minister of Technology @Mic'haglh Autófil, O.Be

There have been a growing number of Wittenberg outages over the past couple weeks. The latest one, occuring today, was of a longer duration which raises increased concern. There has been, at present, no official comment from the Government concerning the cause of these series of outages nor any communication on any plans to address their cause, if possible.

After today's outage, and with some familiarity with the potential for Wittenberg outages, I ask the Minister what information can be shared concerning the cause of these outages and if there are any measures or plans for addressing the cause?

[Breneir Tzaracomprada]

Mr. Speaker,

I rise to remind the Technology Minister of this outstanding terpelaziun @Mic'haglh Autófil, O.Be

[Mic’haglh Autófil, O.Be]

Estimat Tuischac'h,

I thank the Member for his question.

Let me first begin by stating that when such outages occur, assuming they affect not just Wittenberg but the entirety of the nation's web presence, then they would indeed fall under the Ministry's purview. If the wiki and other services remain unaffected and only Wittenberg goes down, that would appear to be more of a Chancery issue under Title J. (I am responding here to comments from the Member on Discord regarding Chancery vs. Government responsibility, to be clear.)

To address the Terpelaziun posed: the Wittenberg outages in recent weeks appear to not be caused by any technical issue with our hosting service -- as were, for example, some of the outages following maintenance to our Digital Ocean server earlier in the summer -- but are instead caused by external factors, chief of which appears to be a larger number of bots, likely web crawlers, attempting to communicate with the server. When the server receives too many requests in a short amount of time, it basically overloads and will go offline.

The Permanent Secretary has already implemented an anti-bot measure to counter these bots, which at least in its first week appears to be properly thwarting excessive requests.