By South Dakota Supreme Court justices declared a judicial emergency on Wednesday, Aug. 20 as state government telephone systems and websites were down for a second day.
“All deadlines, time schedules, due dates and filing requirements imposed by applicable statutes, rules and court orders are suspended until further ordered by the court,” according to a news release from the justices.
The problem is affecting the state Unified Judicial System’s e-court, e-payments, and file and serve platforms, per the release.
Crews are working to resolve the issues that started Tuesday, Aug. 19. The cause is not yet known.
When services will be restored, not yet known
There’s no estimated timeline for when services might be restored, The Dakota Scout reported Wednesday. That means routine business such as renewing license plates, getting driver’s licenses, paying taxes or registering businesses can’t be done.
Attorney General Marty Jackley told the Scout that there doesn’t appear to be criminal intent behind the outage. If that changes, he said his office will prosecute the perpetrators.
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“The event affected all state-hosted services and some network communications,” State Bureau of Information and Telecommunications spokesperson Lisa Rahja said Tuesday in an emailed statement to South Dakota Searchlight. “The state engineer and BIT technical staff have investigated the root cause and are taking measures to remediate.”
The state’s data center is not a single location, Rahja said, it’s the term used by the bureau to refer to all the hardware scattered across multiple locations and connected to the state’s communications network.
She said the problem is not weather-related, and that “there’s no reason to believe there’s any other external factors.
“We’re trying to really get that back up and running, but we can’t even nail down what part of it is having the issues because it’s all very large and complex for the entire state,” Rahja said.
An incident command center was launched Tuesday to streamline communications between the bureau and the office of the state engineer as they work to resolve the issue.
Some state websites down entirely
Some state websites remain entirely down because of the outage.
The state Legislature and Unified Judicial System websites are working, though the UJS homepage said “connectivity issues” might prevent some online features from working.
The Lawrence County Treasurer’s office in Deadwood, like every other treasurer’s office in the state, was unable to print vehicle registrations on Tuesday. Typically, there’s a mailing fee for customers who ask that records be sent, said Sally Atkinson, a deputy treasurer in Lawrence County.
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Instead, attendants took checks and prepared paperwork for registrations, titles and the like and offered to send the documents without the fee.
“It’s not their fault. They drove up here to get this done and now they can’t,” Atkinson said.