Nicosia, Apr 12 (IANS): A water leak at a server room in the basement of the Finance Ministry in Cyprus knocked off all online services of the country's government, a top official confirmed.

The Ministry's Permanent Secretary George Panteli said here on Tuesday that the leak was detected after working hours on Monday and technicians were forced to turn off all the servers for security reasons, reports Xinhua news agency.

Panteli also said that the leak was caused by a malfunctioning valve that was supposed to switch off water supply to a storage tank.

Visitors to government websites received a message that the page they were trying to visit could not be reached as the server was unavailable.

The Deputy Ministry for Research, Innovation and Digital Policy has launched an investigation into why there was a delay of several months in applying last November's cabinet decision to move the servers from the Ministry of Finance basement to a safer place at the premises of the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority.

Panteli said that by late Tuesday all servers had been dried and efforts will be made to restart them by Wednesday morning.