The city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is facing a debilitating cyberattack.
The city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is in the midst of a “debilitating cyber incident,” forcing officials to shut down most digital municipal services.
The city's mayor and city council did not respond to requests for comment, but the government confirmed the cyberattack in a message on its website last week.
Fayetteville is the second largest city in Arkansas, with nearly 100,000 residents, and is part of the Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Statistical Area, which consists of three counties and has more than 575,000 residents.
“The City of Fayetteville has experienced a suspected cyber incident and most of the City’s online services have been taken offline as a precautionary measure. This includes email, online payments, inspection scheduling and network applications,” the city said.
“Police, fire and 911 emergency services are not affected by this issue. The city’s IT department has mobilized all available resources and is working on the issue. Online services are expected to remain unavailable for at least several days.”.
City officials added that if the Fayetteville Police Department's non-emergency phone lines are not working, they can be reached at various other numbers.
State officials did not respond to requests for comment, but in updates on June 12, the city said its email systems were still down.
Utility bill payments must be made in person and can only be made by cash or check; however, no one will have their utility services cut off, while the city will be dealing with the disruption of its network.
Public meetings, which are typically held online, will not be available for virtual viewing while they are experiencing the outage , as the city's Zoom systems have been disabled due to the outage.
Fayetteville IT Director Keith Macedo told local news outlet 4029 News on Tuesday that the city hired three different cybersecurity firms to help deal with the incident.
Fayetteville is the latest city to experience service outages due to cyberattacks or ransomware incidents. Several large U.S. municipalities have faced crippling incidents this year, which have limited emergency services and led to the theft of residents' information.
It took the City of Dallas nearly a month to partially recover from a devastating ransomware incident that caused a series of problems. Augusta , Georgia, as well as Oakland, were among the major cities attacked in 2023, along with several local governments in South Carolina, California, Oregon, and New Jersey.
Source of information: therecord.media
