A fault appears to have begun developing with the departmental firewall about 7:30pm on Tuesday 27th October. The firewall appears to have limped along offering intermittent service until about 10:30pm.
Repairs to the firewall were attempted this morning and service was briefly restored. In parallel work was done on the department's new firewall to bring it into service early if required.
Service is expected to be restored via the new firewall by 11:30am should the old kit not be fixed by that time.
Apologies to all for the inconvenience.
Update: service was restored at 11:14am.