Computer outage stalls Montana government

HELENA – Computer systems across much of state government went down Monday, stalling the work of state workers and leaving consumers unable to renew drivers’ licenses, license plates or get online fishing permits.

Technicians had pinpointed the problem by Monday night and expected the state’s primary systems – including those related to the Justice Department – to be back to normal this morning.

“The states’ connectivity has been restored, and we’re in the process of bringing things back up,” Dawn Pizzini of the Information Technology Services Division said around 10:30 p.m. “It was determined that this was a hardware failure. We had a major piece of equipment that died.”

State workers were largely idled because of the problem.

Some key systems used by the Montana Highway Patrol and others were rerouted on an emergency basis, the governor’s office said. And arrangements had been made so that “debit cards” used by those with food stamps to buy groceries would work, the Information Technology Services Division said.

But the vast majority of services and computers were down, said Dick Clark, the state’s chief information officer. Clark said state government was essentially immobilized.

The information technology department was unable to e-mail a news release to reporters during the day. A printer was hooked up to a laptop to print out a release that could be handed out.

Workers monitoring the state network saw a “spike” in traffic around 1:30 a.m. Monday morning, and noticed performance problems. The network then shut down.

Clark said state government last saw similar problems when a virus brought the network down about four years ago.

Pizzini said the problem affected all IT services from the state. Anything that required access to a state-provided system was unavailable, she said.

Technicians worked with vendors looking for a fix.

Governor’s spokeswoman Sarah Elliott said the governor’s office had been given little information about the cause of the problem.

“What I do know is that they don’t know yet what the problem is,” she said Monday afternoon.

The state Motor Vehicle Division said license plate renewals, vehicle registrations, titles and other services were not working.

Some car dealers were unable to issue temporary registration permits for vehicles they sold, said Dean Roberts, division administrator.

Tom Palmer, spokesman with the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said agents reverted to paper permit applications. He said a lot of people were trying to meet a June 1 deadline to apply for a big game permit.

Palmer said employees working at the front desk had “purple fingers dealing with all the carbon copies.”

He said fishing permits couldn’t be purchased on the Internet or over the usual computer system on Monday. Some consumers told agents they would wait until later to buy a permit rather than go through the old paper system, he said.

“We’re basically doing it the old fashioned way,” Palmer said.

Clark said the state will have to re-evaluate its network and look for ways to make it more “robust” after the current problem is solved.

He said he didn’t have an estimate for how many workers or people were effected by the outage.