NT Government departments including hospitals, police, courts and schools have been impacted by a system-wide network failure resulting in a lack of phone and internet services Thursday morning that government officials started working on around 5am, but were unable to say by noon when they expect the system to be functioning again.

The government said they did not believe the outage was due to a cyber attack but is Territory-wide.

Police have stressed their emergency phone operations are currently functioning as required, but asked Territorians to only call in an emergency.

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

Department of Corporate and Digital Development deputy chief executive Greg Connors said the department and their service provider are 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 has “backup firewalls ready to turn on”, but that solution would mean a complete outage of government online services for between 30 and 50 minutes.

“We’re reluctant to do that,” he said. “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 is 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,” he said.

Interruptions are expected 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 is 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.

Police updates are being provided via the Secure NT and NT Police social media pages.

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