Elche Town Hall has been left without internet, telephone services or access to digital certificates following a network system crash that has affected all municipal offices.
The incident occurred at two o’clock yesterday,Thursday, 5th November, and continued unresolved throughout the morning and afternoon. According to information obtained by this newspaper, the outage has disrupted the work of up to 1,800 municipal employees.
Staff received an email from the Telecommunications service shortly after 8 am informing them of the situation. Since then, connection problems have hampered municipal services by preventing internet access, disrupting phone lines, and stopping the use of digital certificates.
Municipal sources have confirmed that the disruption is down to a “technical problem” which is currently “in the process of being resolved”.
Sources close to the matter explain that the local authority has two data processing centres, located in Calle del Lago and the Las Chimeneas area. These facilities are designed to maintain IT operations should one suffer an incident. According to these sources, the failure of a single centre should not cause the total paralysis of municipal systems or leave around 1,800 officials unable to work, as the second centre is set up to act as a backup. Consequently, they believe the fact that the entire network is down suggests the issue may be affecting both processing centres.
Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the PSOE at Elche Town Hall, Héctor Díez, demanded explanations from the PP and Vox governing team regarding an incident that prevented municipal staff from carrying out their duties normally on Thursday morning, while also impacting public service delivery. The socialist politician questioned the state of technological modernisation alongside the resources allocated to IT and telecommunications. He argued that the council must prioritise these investments to guarantee functioning public services, stating that an entire town hall cannot be allowed to remain paralysed for a whole day.
The event comes just weeks after details emerged of another cyberattack against a local service. In early October, it was revealed that the BiciElx bicycle rental platform was targeted on 3rd September by a hacking attempt. That offensive combined manual checks with automated processes using an artificial intelligence agent designed to adapt its actions based on results.
According to the council, the Information Technology team at Pimesa managed to detect and block the intrusion before it compromised the platform, allowing the service to remain fully operational throughout. On that occasion, the perpetrator admitted responsibility, presenting themselves at the municipal company’s facilities to confess and offer assistance in analysing the breach. Pimesa lodged a complaint with the National Police, and the case was placed before the courts.
This latest system failure comes just over a year after Elche Town Hall suffered a major cyberattack in August 2025 which rendered the municipal computer system inoperable. That attack affected council servers, forced the suspension of administrative deadlines, and shut down numerous services. System recovery took several weeks as the council gradually restored electronic services and audited more than 1,800 computers. However, council officials maintain that Thursday’s network failure is strictly a technical issue and have not linked the two incidents.
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