The US state of Virginia’s IT service provider has apologised for a storage infrastructure fault that disrupted services for 27 state government agencies earlier this week.

“Northrop Grumman deeply regrets the disruption and inconvenience this has caused state agencies and Virginia citizens,” said the company’s president in a statement. “We have deployed significant resources and our staff has worked tirelessly … to thoroughly verify and restore access to data and restore normal operations to the agencies."

The initial fault is reported to have occurred in a memory card within state’s storage area network, and was described by the manufacturer EMC as “unprecedented”. However, the extent of the disruption was magnified when the back-up infrastructure also failed.

"A piece of equipment that is meant to never go down, went down," Virginia’s CIO Sam Nixon told local reporters yesterday. "The recovery time has been unacceptable. We are certainly looking to Northrop Grumman to make this right.”