Residents have been struggling to contact Merton Council for the last two days, after the hot weather caused their systems to crash.
The council’s air conditioning units, which normally keep servers cool, failed in the abnormally hot weather as temperatures soared past 30 degrees this week.
Please bear with us while we resolve the issues with our phones at the Civic Centre today. Most online services unaffected.
— Merton Council (@Merton_Council) July 19, 2016
Please continue to bear with us while we experience technical issues with our phone system and website.
— Merton Council (@Merton_Council) July 20, 2016
Merton’s email system, telephone system and website have all been crashing and experiencing technical difficulties as a result.
A council spokeswoman said there had been intermittent problems since Monday but the system went down entirely on Wednesday.
However, a ‘business continuity plan’ has been implemented to try and make sure residents can still contact emergency council services.
The council explained that a business continuity plan is a plan a business has in place to enable employees to continue working to the best of their ability in the event of a system failure or other unforeseen circumstance which affects the working day. Each department in the council has its own plan in place.
Chief executive of Merton Council, Ged Curran, said: “I would like to apologise to residents for any inconvenience this has caused.
“Our engineers are working hard to resolve the situation as soon as we can.”
It is not yet known how long the systems will be down for.
To contact child safeguarding and care planning, call 07967 327 901
To contact the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) service, call 07976 406 897
For highways emergencies, call 07956 619 595 or 07714 660 625
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