The wheels of Government ground to a halt yesterday after a glitch caused computer systems to shut down.

The technical malfunction meant that thousands of Civil Servants were left out of pocket, albeit just for one day. The electronic payment of salaries into bank accounts was delayed yesterday, and engineers are now scrambling to make sure that wages will be paid today.

According to a Government spokesman, the network outage first hit on Saturday morning “affecting most of the Government network including the airport and government systems and websites”.

“This outage was caused by a core network switch failure,” the spokesman added last night.

“ITO network engineers have been working through the weekend and today (Monday) and have begun to restore services to the network. ITO engineers will continue to work on this through this evening.”

The Royal Gazette first learned of the shutdown just before noon yesterday. And by mid-afternoon, one civil servant said that staff had received a notice informing them that they would not be getting paid until later in the week, and that the outage was likely to last for the rest of the day.

A Government spokesman later said: “Due to the Government Server being down this morning, the Accountant General’s Department is experiencing technical problems with the payroll module which means that the April 2013 payroll will not be paid today.

“The Department is working with the banks to ensure salaries are paid for ‘pay day’ April 30, 2013 and apologises for any inconvenience caused.”