The Phoenix pay system was one of several government services that were affected by a computer glitch on Tuesday morning, adding to an already long list of issues linked to the beleaguered program.
A spokesperson for the office of Minister of Public Services and Procurement Judy Foote confirmed that Phoenix had been affected, and was off-line for a period of time. The system was expected to be back up and running later Tuesday morning.
It’s unclear what led to the outage or what other systems were affected.
READ MORE: How did this all start, and how did the Phoenix problems get so bad?
Phoenix has been facing significant and ongoing problems since its launch last winter. Officials blamed a steep learning curve and a large backlog of files for the issues, which have included people failing to receive any pay at all, being underpaid and not receiving overtime or back-pay.
Foote’s department is still struggling to ensure nearly 300,000 federal public servants get the money they are owed. The government has given itself until Oct. 31 to get the system back on track.
On Monday, Foote appeared before a House of Commons committee to discuss the payroll debacle. During her testimony, the minister said that the previous Conservative government laid off hundreds of payroll employees and there was “no going back” on the Phoenix launch in February.
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