OTTAWA—Smoke inside a federal data centre this morning has shut down email, some government websites and even the maligned Phoenix payroll system. The government’s central IT department, Shared Services Canada, says there was no fire in the Ottawa area data centre — even though there was smoke detected inside. Shared Services says some 50,000 public service workers couldn’t send email throughout the day because the BlackBerry email servers were down. The Phoenix payroll system, already under scrutiny for problems that have affected pay for some 80,000 public workers, is back up and running, although Shared Services didn’t say how long it was offline. The centre was evacuated and went into an emergency shutdown that crippled work across multiple departments, including Transport Canada, where inspectors and special agents were unable to send or receive emails on their BlackBerry devices.

Source: thestar July 27, 2016 21:33 UTC