SAAQ outage: ‘The problem is not solved, far from it’

Although the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ)’s IT services resumed Thursday after an outage lasting more than a day, “the problem is not resolved, far from it,” indicated the Minister of Cybersecurity and Digital Affairs, Gilles Bélanger.

After accusing Microsoft of being responsible for the outage at the SAAQ, the minister no longer displayed the same assurance on Thursday in the parliamentary committee on the study of his budget appropriations. 

“Microsoft asks the SAAQ to make such and such a change, and then there’s a problem: whose responsibility is it? I don’t think we should be the arbiters here or define whose fault it is,” said  Bélanger, in response to a question from MNA Haroun Bouazzi of Québec solidaire (QS).  

There was already “a problem” and to correct it, Microsoft took “action” on one server, which had a knock-on effect on all the others, the minister said.

But a senior official was more explicit about the responsibility of the government and the SAAQ.

“Without knowing the details of what happened to our colleagues, we are the ones who carry out the maintenance operations, so we are the ones who are in charge of deploying the patches, so it is a private cloud, installed on site,” explained the assistant deputy minister for technological infrastructure and office automation, Sylvain Goulet, in committee.

“So it’s not Microsoft that’s updating, it’s the people at the SAAQ who carried out the update,” summarized Bouazzi. 

“It wasn’t Microsoft that did something, it was us that did something,” he concluded. 

“We still have to be careful, it was Microsoft who guided the SAAQ,” Bélanger countered.

As the minister did on Wednesday, the state-owned company blamed Microsoft, while assuring that “no customer data was compromised.”

Contingency plan

Bélanger said he was still “worried” about the outage and had spent the last two nights following up.

“I asked that a contingency plan be put in place as quickly as possible to ensure that the interruption of services is as short as possible,” he said in response to a question from PQ MNA Joël Arseneau.  

The SAAQ also emphasizes that it will extend its opening hours in the coming days to accommodate appointments cancelled in recent days.

Police services have already been able to use the system for checking driving licences and registrations since the end of Wednesday, it was announced.

So, it was not the controversial SAAQClic solution that was at fault, but the server that hosts it, which is owned by Microsoft.

“Still good”

The minister acknowledged that Microsoft’s “level of service” was “still good” and he was not sure that the government could propose its own solution that would be “competitive.”

But considering the issues of data sovereignty, “I think we need a strategy.”

SAAQ IT services had been paralyzed since Tuesday afternoon, forcing the closure of service centers and agents on Wednesday. The SAAQclic platform, although “functional,” was inaccessible.

This was another setback for the state-owned company, which is already the subject of a public inquiry into the failures of its digital shift.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews