St. Johns County maintains continuity of operations despite global tech outages

St. Johns County has maintained its continuity of operations despite the impacts of Friday’s global tech issues caused by a national cybersecurity firm’s faulty system update, according to county officials.

“We want to give our citizens a timely update on the tech outage here in St. Johns County,” said County Administrator Joy Andrews. “Currently, county staff is working diligently alongside the Clerk of the Courts and the Sheriff’s Office to restore all systems. However, it is important to confirm that this community’s public safety and the security of the county’s financial assets were never at risk.”

Andrews said no breach of data has been confirmed at this time.

“We adapted to the outages, maintained our operations, and progressed forward to provide services to the public,” she said. “Despite this worldwide outage, the county’s ability to respond to our local community was never at risk. Today’s event solidifies that our staffing levels, resources, third-party contractors, redundancy services and equipment provide the necessary coverage we need for an unforeseeable event like this.”

The county provided a summary of the events as of 10 a.m. Friday, July 19:

• The county was first made aware of this issue around 2 a.m. Friday.

• The 911 emergency system never lost the ability to receive calls from the public and for public safety and first responders to respond to scenes.

• The CAD (computer-aided dispatch) inside 911 was impacted and calls for service were manually dispatched to different addresses. CAD was operational by 5:30 a.m.

• There has been no delay in response times for public safety calls for service.

• The Emergency Operations Center maintained access to the state’s EOC and has no impact on its ability to respond to a local emergency.

• The county has more than 100 servers and more than 1,000 individual employee computers, which it continues to assess.

“I am grateful for our team of employees who worked around the clock to maintain service to the St. Johns County community,” Andrews concluded. “Their dedication today illuminates their value as public servants to our citizens.”