The Norwegian Police Security Service’s (PST) website was down for about an hour on Thursday morning. Later the same day PST declared that the outage was caused by an error related to an external service provider.

– An error has occurred with those we host our websites with. No external attacks, says Martin Bernsen in PST on the phone to Digi.

He says that the downtime occurred as a result of a small configuration change. (Digi.no)

That such an incident could happen to PST, which surely has near unlimited computer expertise at its disposal, raises the question of whether PST has sufficient security routines in place. An outage caused by “a small configuration change” does not sound very reassuring. Many, including Document News, asked if the downtime could have been the result of a sophisticated cyber-attack.