Leicester City Council’s IT systems and phone lines are expected to remain out of service until “at least midweek” following a cyber attack. Systems have been down since Thursday, March 7.

The local authority said it was working with “cyber security and law enforcement partners” to try to get them up and running again. It has said today that hopes by Wednesday will be able to “start the recovery process”, prioritising the “most critical services”.

The council has not given any details about the nature of the cyber attack, but said it was the latest “in a number of local authorities” to be hit by such incidents this year. At the start of the year, three Kent councils were hit by almost simultaneous attacks, knocking systems offline.

READ MORE:Users’ fears as ‘lifeline’ Leicester mental health support service set to close

The council has apologised to residents for “the inconvenience this is causing”. Emergency phone lines have been set up for those who need urgent assistance. The council has stressed it is “not for general inquiries”. The emergency contact details can be found on the homepage of the council’s website.

Last week, local Green Party councillor Patrick Kitterick said the situation was “pretty major” as far as Government IT outages go. He added: “As [Leicester City Council is] the civil emergency lead body, it is pretty serious not to have an operating server system for this long.”

He added today that a 24 hour outage was “bad”, and that systems going down for almost a week was “pretty much unheard of.” Coun Kitterick said he would be raising the matter at the Audit and Risk committee this month.

Richard Sword, the council’s strategic director of city developments and neighbourhoods, said: “Over the weekend we have continued to work with our cyber security and law enforcement partners, as well as learning from other councils who have had attacks, to identify the nature of the incident and the steps we need to take to get our systems back online.

“We expect that it will take until at least the middle of the week before we will be able to start the recovery process, beginning with our most critical services.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this is causing. Council officers are working hard to ensure that our frontline services continue to operate with the minimum of disruption.

“Advice and assistance is still available on our website at Leicester.gov.uk, and we have today set up more emergency phone lines in addition to those established last Thursday. These numbers are to aid those who need urgent assistance and not for general inquiries.”