Civil Defence website crash during tsunami alert due to third-party problems - minister

The Emergency Management Minister has been told problems with third party services crashed the Civil Defence website during a tsunami alert.

And work is underway to speed up an emergency map system that was too slow.

The website went down during last week's Fiordland earthquake and tsunami event.

Mark Mitchell met with the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) on Tuesday.

He said it told him it had extensively strength-tested the website over the last year.

"But issues with third party services led to Thursday's outage."

This was an "unfortunate combination" of a problem with the firewall - that has since been fixed - and a global outage affecting the software controlling the failover to NEMA's backup site.

NEMA was working with the third party responsible for the failover software and had put in place manual processes meantime to function in an emergency.

"I have instructed NEMA officials to provide me with regular reporting as permanent fixes are progressed," Mitchell said in a statement.

A second piece of emergency tech also failed to perform as it should, both in the tsunami alert and in the earlier Wairoa evacuation alert, when the new emergency mobile alert map did not update as quickly as it should.

"The current feed is proving too slow for live alerts, and NEMA is now redesigning how the map handles the data behind the scenes so it can refresh more regularly," Mitchell told RNZ.

Text alerts went to residents in both events, and the map is mostly for media or friends and family outside the area to know where alerts apply to.

It was still in the testing phase. "These recent events have been valuable in helping NEMA to identify improvements," the minister said.