A hardware error at a municipal data center has caused a large IT outage in Germany’s western state of Saarland.

According to Saarland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalization and Energy (MWIDE), the service disruption at the Saarland state computing center on March 25 left several municipal departments temporarily unable to send or receive emails, though phone lines remained up and running.

The nature of the hardware error was not disclosed. DCD has approached the ministry for comment.

“The cause [of the outage was] a technical defect in the data center, specifically a hardware error,” said MWIDE. “The temporary disruption in email delivery has now been resolved. There is currently no indication of an external attack.”

MWIDE said that the region’s disaster relief, fire, and police departments remained unaffected by the outage. However, according to Saarbrücker Zeitung, more than one petabyte of affected data held at the Saarland state computing center will have to be migrated to a backup system in a process that the publication said “could take several days.”

The Saarland state computing center was first proposed in 2013 as part of an administrative modernization project, with Saarland’s minister for Europe and finance, Stephen Toscani, proposing that all public IT systems eventually be transferred to the data center.

“By pooling expertise in one location,” said Toscani, “we are making our administration fit for future IT challenges.”

The facility was eventually brought online in the early 2020s, with 140 staff now working at Saarland’s State Office for IT Services in the region’s capital, Saarbrücken.

The private data center market in Saarland is underdeveloped compared to other market hubs in Germany, including Frankfurt, which boasts 128 such facilities according to DataCenterMap.

For its part, the small state on the French border hosts only four data centers: two in the town of Saarlouis, one in the capital of Saarbrücken, and another operated by KÜS DATA in Losheim-am-See, in its northern reaches.

Learn more about the data center market in Switzerland and the wider DACH region, and meet with other executives and experts at the DCN Zurich event later this year.