Upgrades blamed for huge B.C. .gov computer crash

The B.C.'s government's largest-ever computer crash was caused by routine upgrades that somehow brought down the entire system, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Computer technicians were installing "normal" upgrades to systems Monday afternoon when they inadvertently generated a huge amount of traffic to the government network, causing it to crash, said Lara Perzoff of the Citizens' Services Ministry.

"It's a big network, but the amount of traffic they were working with completely overloaded the system, causing it to fail," said Perzoff. All government websites, its employee intranet and email servers crashed simultaneously and were offline from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.