Every Taipei City Government site under the gov.taipei domain went dark on the night of Sept. 26. That knocked out the city’s main site, department pages, and the 1999 online complaint system. Services only started coming back in waves early on Sept. 27.
City websites under one domain went down at roughly the same time
The report said the outage began at around 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 26. The Taipei City Government homepage, a range of department websites, and the 1999 online complaint platform used by residents all went down at almost the exact same moment. The disruption hit sites across the gov.taipei domain, and the city’s online services stayed down through the night.
Lin Liang-chun, a Taipei City councilor from the Democratic Progressive Party, said that after asking the city government for answers, the early assessment pointed to a hardware issue involving the cloud host carrying the websites. In her retelling of the city’s position, that problem caused sites under the gov.taipei domain to go down at the same time. As of the report’s publication, the city still had not publicly given a formal explanation of the exact cause.
More than 10 departments were affected
Social media counts cited in the report said more than 10 city departments were hit that night. Sites for agencies including the Department of Civil Affairs and the Police Department either showed 502 Bad Gateway errors or simply failed to load after timing out.
The 1999 online complaint system went down during the same stretch. But the 1999 telephone hotline stayed up, leaving it as the only live channel for residents to report problems in real time.
Questions return over the city’s backup arrangements
The report said Taipei City Government had made continuity plans years ago. In August 2021, the city’s Department of Information Technology signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Center for High-performance Computing to build a backup facility at the national center in Taichung.
A city news release at the time said the goal was to "prevent sudden incidents in the future from disrupting information services." Lu Hsin-ke, who was then commissioner of the Department of Information Technology, said the idea grew out of observations made during a trip to Estonia with the mayor, where a digital embassy model had been created so operations could be restored overseas if domestic systems came under attack.
The backup plan described then covered the Department of Information Technology’s core systems as well as backups for individual departments, though it did not specify which items were included. After this outage stretched on for several hours, the report said the public would want to know whether the affected websites were part of the off-site backup scope, whether backup mechanisms were switched on, and whether failover procedures had ever been rehearsed.
Single-point failure risk moves back into focus
The report cast the outage as a blunt reminder of the trade-off that comes with centralized management. Put websites on one unified system and you can cut costs and make maintenance easier. But one hardware failure can also wipe out the entire city government’s web presence in one shot.
And the fact that the 1999 phone line stayed online drove home the value of keeping a non-digital fallback. The report’s point was simple: digitization does not mean every analog backup route should disappear. Sometimes the reserve channel is the one that matters most when the main system breaks.
The article also pointed to the crypto industry’s familiar warning about avoiding a single point of failure. Its argument was not that blockchain systems never fail. It was that resilience comes down to whether a system is built so another part can take over when one piece stops working.