A cooling system failure in the Cayman Islands government's main computer data centre was blamed for widespread technical problems in most central government offices over the past week.

Information provided by the Computer Services Department indicated that the centre's back up cooling system also failed, causing the system to overheat.

Computer services officials said the system failure was responsible for slowed data processing.

Some government computer users were unable to access files on their local computer drives; others had to use personal accounts to send e-mails.

However, Computer Services Director Gilbert McLaughlin said the cooling system failure did not lead to any loss of central data or government databases.

"The system's security has not been compromised," a government statement read. "Access to individual user files and shared file servers are affected."

The initial outage occurred during the last week of January and continued to plague government computer systems all last week.