Residents have been struggling to contact Merton Council for the last two days, after the hot weather caused their systems to crash.

The council’s air conditioning units, which normally keep servers cool, failed in the abnormally hot weather as temperatures soared past 30 degrees this week.

Merton’s email system, telephone system and website have all been crashing and experiencing technical difficulties as a result.

A council spokeswoman said there had been intermittent problems since Monday but the system went down entirely on Wednesday. 

However, a ‘business continuity plan’ has been implemented to try and make sure residents can still contact emergency council services.

The council explained that a business continuity plan is a plan a business has in place to enable employees to continue working to the best of their ability in the event of a system failure or other unforeseen circumstance which affects the working day. Each department in the council has its own plan in place.

Chief executive of Merton Council, Ged Curran, said: “I would like to apologise to residents for any inconvenience this has caused.

“Our engineers are working hard to resolve the situation as soon as we can.”

It is not yet known how long the systems will be down for.

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