HIO says Gesy website outage was not a hacking

Problems faced by the health insurers’ organisation (HIO)’s IT system which resulted in Gesy’s health portal going down for several hours last month were in no way related to any data security issues, the HIO’s deputy director-general Efi Kammitsi said on Wednesday.

Speaking to the Cyprus News Agency, she said the issues experienced were “purely due to a system efficiency problem which is being resolved by the contracting company and in no way concerns any issues of data security or a collapse thereof”.

“The system has basically become slow in terms of its performance,” she said, adding that this has caused four incidents related to the website’s stability in recent months.

With this in mind, she said a meeting had been held between the HIO’s board of directors and representatives of the company contracted to run Gesy’s website, and that the company had “given explanations and discussed how the issue was handled”.

“The contracting company has informed us that it was neither a matter of data security, nor was it any serious issue,” she said.

She went on to say that on the whole, the IT system has been “very stable over time since Gesy was introduced in 2019”.

“We have a very good and stable IT system and this continues to be the case, we just happened to have these issues recently,” she said, adding that such a serious outage has “never happened in the past”.

“There were some technical issues which arose from the contractor’s side, and they have assured us that they have taken all the necessary measures to resolve them,” she said.

She was keen to point out that Gesy’s IT system is “very large and very complex, because it has connections with various other sub-systems”. It is these connections, she said, which sometimes make the website load slowly and cause other related issues.

“People felt this inconvenience due to this, for example when they logged in to order prescriptions. The system became slow for some time, on some days, and that is why this problem arose. The system did not crash, but it was slow, and so there was a delay in service,” she said.

She said the particular issue which caused the website to be slow has now been “definitively resolved”, but did note that other, similar issues may slow the website down in the future.

However, she said, when there are similar back-end issues on Gesy’s website, efforts are routinely made to ensure as best as possible that they do not impact the services offered.

“The effort is there to not have the issues be felt by ordinary people, and to not have an impact on the quality of service,” she said.

Gesy’s website had encountered serious problems last month, with the website displaying a message which read that Gesy portals “are currently unavailable due to a technical issue”. The problem was resolved within hours.