'Foul play' ruled out after council power outage

Loxley House was hit by an "unprecedented" power outage

No personal data was lost as a result of a power cut at Nottingham City Council's headquarters, the authority's chief executive has said.

Loxley House was hit by a "major" outage on Thursday 13 March which affected core IT systems, and disruption lasted more than a week.

Sajeeda Rose said the council was satisfied there was no criminal activity linked to the incident.

"Of course that's the first thing that springs to everyone's mind - is there a cyber-attack or foul play at hand? Absolutely, categorically none," she said.

Sajeeda Rose said she was proud of the council's response

The council said the power cut was caused by a failure within the electrical safety circuit of the high-voltage switchgear at Loxley House, but systems were fully restored on Monday.

The building's data centre was impacted, but Mrs Rose said there was no risk to residents' personal data.

She added: "There were no leaks of data, no breaches in terms of data use, so I can be absolute confident there were no breaches and therefore no reason to worry."

The incident has been described as a "once-in-a-lifetime" power failure and Mrs Rose said it could not have been predicted.

"The building is 25 years old and we will find elements that we wouldn't have been able to predict as part of general maintenance," she said.

She added while there was some "minor disruption" for city residents, she was "proud" of the council's response.

"We used our business continuity plans, we used our back-up plans and services continued to be delivered," she said.