UPDATED: NT Government departments including hospitals, police, courts and schools were impacted by a system-wide network failure resulting in a lack of phone and internet services for more than 12 hours Thursday, with government officials unable to get the system functioning again until close to 4pm.

The cause of the Territory-wide IT system outage is still under investigation, but the government said it did not believe it was the result of a cyber attack.

An incident management team was set up at the Peter McAuley Centre in Berrimah, while officials work through the issues.

Police had stressed their Triple Zero emergency phone line was not impacted but other non-emergency systems were not fully operational.

The Territory Emergency Operations Centre issued a statement at 3:45pm to say the Territory-wide ICT outage had been resolved.

“The Department of Corporate and Digital Development (DCDD), supported by technical and service providers, has implemented workarounds to restore affected services,” it said.

It did not explain what those “workarounds” were.

“DCDD is continuing to investigate the root cause and identify measures to prevent similar disruptions in the future,” the statement said.

“The NT Government thanks staff, technical teams and the community for their patience.”

Department of Corporate and Digital Development deputy chief executive Greg Connors had on Thursday morning said the department and their service provider were currently still assessing what the problem is, but stated it was not part of a cyber attack.

“Right now we’re working our hardest to find out exactly what the fault is, and then we will obviously rectify that,” he told Mix 104.9 just before noon.

Mr Connors said the government had “backup firewalls ready to turn on”, but that solution would mean a complete outage of government online services for between 30 and 50 minutes.

It was unclear if that was the “workaround” implemented.

“We’re reluctant to do that,” Mr Connors said at the time. “We’re working at the moment on obviously a degraded performance where we can get some services for a little while.

“We are working our hardest to minimise the impact, but it is difficult.”

He added shutting down government network services for 30 – 50 minutes during business hours would be the last resort due to the impact it could have on health services and the police, but was an option if the problem persists.

“We certainly don’t want to do it where it would impact them at key times,” Mr Connors said.

“At the moment [the outage] is impacting everyone, but just to a degraded sense.”

Mr Connors said “for the most part” government departments were experiencing “delays, what we call latency”, meaning the system was sluggish.

“[But] in some cases, it just simply isn’t there,” he said. “Whether that’s a service like MVR or it’s an application like Acacia, for instance, in the hospital, it may not respond in a timely fashion at all until the network rectifies itself.

“Now, that could be minutes, it could be several minutes, and it would be extremely frustrating for our clinicians and for our police staff.”

Interruptions occurred throughout the rest of the day.

“I can say to you right now that we are very, very, very confident this is not a cyber incident,” Mr Connors said on Mix.

“Occasionally you get glitches in networks. Occasionally your car breaks down and up until the day it broke down, it was working perfectly. Today is one of those days where one part of two of our firewalls in a collection of several is not behaving. It’s not letting traffic through, it’s actually behaving like it’s not there at all.”

Mr Connors said there had been no previous indication of a failure.

However, the NT Independent understands NT Police were experiencing email failures earlier in the week, but it is unclear whether that was connected to Thursday’s full system outage.

“I wish we had some indicators because we would have acted on them,” Mr Connors said. “It just occurred this morning. This may have started as early as 3am, but our first incident ticket came through shortly after 5am and we’ve been busy at it since.”

Police issued a statement just before 1pm to say Triple Zero remains operational for life-threatening emergencies or active crimes in progress, but asked people not to call for non-urgent matters.

The non-emergency 131 444 line was experiencing “technical disruptions”, with police asking Territorians to delay calling that line until services are fully restored. They also recommended attending a local police station in person if a matter is non-life-threatening.