Newsroom
For more than five hours on Tuesday, much of Cyprus’ public sector went… well, offline. Government websites crashed, Ariadni and Taxisnet went silent, and even post offices and Citizen Service Centers were caught in the digital blackout.
At first, people wondered if the government had fallen victim to a cyberattack. But as it turns out, the culprit wasn’t a hacker in a hoodie, it was a truck.
According to Deputy Director General of the Deputy Ministry of Research and Innovation George Komodromou, the chaos began when “a passing truck accidentally cut through an overhead cable,” disconnecting several key state systems in one go.
Cue hours of disruption, frantic IT teams, and plenty of frustration at service counters.
Deputy Minister Nikodimos Damianos confirmed that the issue had nothing to do with a cyber incident, reassuring the public that it was purely a technical mishap.
Meanwhile, the Department of Information Technology scrambled to switch to “plan B”, not an easy feat when half the network’s down. But by late afternoon, the lights came back on, and by evening, everything from Ariadni to Taxisnet was running smoothly again.
Citizens can finally get back to doing what they love best: filling out online forms without the fear of a “connection error.”
Officials say they’ll be reviewing how one cable managed to bring down so much of the system, because as Tuesday showed, sometimes all it takes is one truck to knock a government off its digital wheels.
