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Lanka Govt Cloud crash due to failure in one of the storage resource pools: Officials
View(s):- Root cause diagnostics and recovery efforts are ongoing with priority being given to data consistency and integrity, says ICTA
By Tharushi Weerasinghe
Initial tests have revealed that last week’s Lanka Government Cloud crash was caused by a storage system failure, which knocked out connected systems and disrupted several online services.
The system failure that occurred last week disrupted multiple e-government services, affecting the Registrar General Department’s vital records system, Department of Motor Traffic’s e-Revenue Licence system, the clearance system of the Department of Police, Department of Commerce’s certificate of origin system, Department of Pensions, e-Local Government System, and websites for the Department of Meteorology, Registrar of Companies, Sri Lanka Accounting and Auditing Standards Board, and Information Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA).
Still down: The ICTA website
“The preliminary and ongoing diagnostics indicate that a technical fault disrupted the underlying infrastructure of the LGC,” said Sanjaya Karunasena, Acting Chief Technical Officer ICTA.
He added that root cause diagnostics are ongoing and are focused on “iteratively guiding the recovery effort”, with the “highest priority being given to data consistency and integrity”. While there is no evidence of a cybersecurity breach or loss of data, he assured that a full-scale root-cause investigation will be carried out after the systems are restored, and the findings and corrective measures will be made public.
Mr. Karunasena refuted media reports which stated that the technical failure occurred due to a system migration. “The migration of services from the existing system to the new system had not commenced as the project was at its penultimate phase of Migration and Contingency Plan assurance.” He also added that the new LGC environment was a “fully resilient and technologically up-to-date infrastructure.”
Service reinstatement is being carried out on a phased basis. Several services — such as the e-Revenue Licence v1, Police Clearance System, and several email services and websites are already operational or under final testing.
Mr. Karunasena held that ICTA was prioritising stability and data integrity over speed of restoration to protect against potential cascading failures. The recovery involves two tracks: immediately migrating priority services to a new advanced environment, and separately fixing the original failure. “The expectation is that all systems will be fully restored within a few days.”
Responding to a question on metrics used to quantify the impacts of disruptions of this nature, Mr. Karunasena noted that “system uptime” was a key performance indicator, and several approaches are used to translate downtime to cost impact.
This is measured through: (i) service impact duration—uptime percentage and hours of unavailability, (ii) operational impact—transactions delayed or manually processed, and (iii) economic and citizen costs—lost digital revenues, manual processing expenses, and additional user costs.
“These metrics will be compiled as part of a post-incident review.”
Mr. Karunasena also added that operational excellence and user experience are central to Sri Lanka’s Digital Economy Blueprint and government digital transformation. “A Service Continuity Index tracking availability and cost metrics across mission-critical systems will be institutionalised within this framework.”
According to media releases by ICTA over the last week, manual alternatives, such as obtaining certificate copies from Divisional Secretariats, were made available to the public during the outage. However, long queues were reported outside several key government document institutions over the last week. The press release also stated that the next phase of LGC modernisation and expansion, which began in October 2025, is underway and will deliver expanded capacity with advanced technology and industry-standard resilience.
The outage comes as Sri Lanka heavily promotes its digital economy agenda. Experts note that inadequate trilingual communication and recurring outages undermine citizen confidence.
“A disruption of this nature is no doubt damaging to citizen and stakeholder confidence,” acknowledged Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya, Executive Director of the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA). He said that ICTA is accountable not only for restoring affected systems and taking corrective measures, but also for rebuilding public trust through the creation of resilient infrastructure and operational capabilities required across government systems.
Dr. Wijayasuriya stressed that maintaining data integrity remains the agency’s highest priority throughout the recovery process, describing it as “the cornerstone of citizen trust.” While the current focus is on restoring the affected services, he said ICTA’s longer-term commitment lies in strengthening Sri Lanka’s digital infrastructure under the national Digital Economy Blueprint. The new architecture, he explained, is being designed to address gaps in both infrastructure and operational frameworks that were exposed by the recent system failure. Several programmes tied to the Blueprint are already in motion.
“Digital infrastructure must evolve alongside adoption,” Dr. Wijayasuriya noted, adding that this requires timely investment and execution. He pointed out that public confidence is built not merely by avoiding disruptions, but by demonstrating resilience when technological failures occur.
Outlining ICTA’s plans, Dr. Wijayasuriya said the upcoming National Digital Infrastructure Reliability Framework will include redundancy tiers, independent failover mechanisms, and cloud diversity to safeguard critical systems. The Digital Infrastructure layer will also feature a 24×7 Government Network Operations Centre (NNOC) for continuous monitoring and rapid incident response.
He added that the future environment will align with Sri Lanka’s sovereign cloud strategy, ensuring local redundancy for critical workloads. Partnerships with expert technology providers—both local and global—will be formalised through clear service-level commitments, technology standards, and operational KPIs. These models, he said, would help ensure Sri Lanka’s digital infrastructure remains “state of the art, resilient, and capable of meeting the demands of institutions and citizens.”
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