OTTAWA -- A major computer glitch left several Canadian police forces without access to warrants, criminal histories and other information vital for officers to do their jobs, CTV News has confirmed.
The RCMP and other Canadian police forces lost access overnight to the Canadian Police Information Centre, a massive database run by the RCMP and accessible by other forces. A government website describes the database as providing "information about crimes and criminals."
The system encountered a "failure of a critical core network device," according to an email sent to Mounties about the problems, and was down for 12 hours overnight.
"As a result of network issues, CPIC is unavailable for the majority of sites and CPIC messaging is unavailable for all sites. We are currently investigating the issue and more information will be provided when it is available," the RCMP said in another force-wide email.
Police officers access the system thousands of times a day to run license plates, check a subject's criminal history and verify whether the subject may have an outstanding warrant. Officers sought work-arounds while the system was down, including phone calls and faxes.
Several sources told CTV News it's not uncommon for CPIC to be unavailable.
A spokesperson for Shared Services Canada, the department in charge of federal government IT, told CTV News that "routers supporting core IT networks and applications for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were not working."
"As a result, some network services and applications were not accessible. [Shared Services Canada] and RCMP worked through the night to bring each application back online while testing for issues along the way. All network services and applications are now up and running," the spokesperson said in an email from a general account with no name attached.
A spokeswoman for Saskatoon Police Service told CTV News the outage was only about seven hours for them, rather than the 12-hour outage experienced by others.
"In the event of any CPIC outage, we have procedures and back-up systems in place to aid officers in their ability to effectively do their jobs. These were in place during the time of the outage so the effect was minimal," Kelsie Fraser wrote in an email.
A spokesperson for the Vancouver Police Department said the outage affected them for about 11 hours. The force still had access to PRIME, a provincial database similar to CPIC, which wasn't affected.
With files from Mercedes Stephenson
