A TELSTRA outage that began last weekend continues to hamstring all three Riverland councils.

The local councils have been without access to data and various phone, email and electronic systems for six days and counting.

It is believed that the Telstra CSX outage is also affecting a range of other businesses and organisations that are operating out of one particular data centre.

Almost all core local government functions have been impacted, including property searches, development assessments, processing Dial Before You Dig requests, and making payments to councils’ contractors.

These time-critical functions are in addition to the array of regular day-to-day functions of the three Riverland councils that are affected.

“It is astonishing in this day and age for an outage to last so long,” said Berri Barmera Council CEO Tim Pfeiffer.

“The effects of this prolonged Telstra CSX outage are having profound effects on our Riverland community.”

“We are currently at day six of this Telstra CSX outage, despite having a service level agreement that allows outages of no more than two hours.”

“The three Riverland Councils do not currently know when or even if Telstra will be able to restore our cloud services.”