Electrical problems: Power spikes or surges (increases in voltage), and brownouts (decreases in voltage) can corrupt disk-held data and damage internal components. Power cuts cause an inability to work, and a loss of all data in memory.
Equipment breakdown: This can prevent data being exchanged or accessed.
Software errors: The presence of bugs (programming errors) in the software of an e-government system can have any number of effects. These include overt or, worse, undetected corruption of data.