City of Bardstown internet service restored Friday night following 18-hour outage

NC GAZETTE / WBRT RADIO
STAFF REPORT

Friday, Sept. 2, 2022 — Bardstown Connect, the City of Bardstown’s internet service, came back online Friday evening at about 8:10 p.m. Friday night following an 18-hour outage.

Bardstown Connect customers were unable to get on the internet nor access their email during the outage, which began at about 3 a.m. Friday.

The city turned to social media to let customers know of the problem and provide assurances the problems were being addressed.

Customers left with no options for going online — many of whom now depend on having the internet in order to work from home — also used social media to express their frustration, anger and dismay at the length of the outage.

Some customers complained about the lack of updates throughout the outage. Left without explanations, rumors filled in the blanks, including one that the city’s internet system had been hit by a ransomware attack.

When the service was restored, Bardstown Connect posted an immediate update via social media:

“We have implemented a fix that should restore service to subscribers. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. We are still working on our end so there may still be some intermittency. We are sorry we have been unable to provide many updates as the issue was being resolved. Problems like these tend to not have an easily predictable ETA for completion. We appreciate your patience.”

CITY WEBSITES MISSING. Though the city’s internet system was up and running to most of its customers, the city’s websites for Bardstown Connect and the City of Barsdtown website was initially missing in action.

In their place were placeholders from Network Solutions noting the sites were “under construction.” Repeated attempts to load the sites were met with either a different version of the “under construction” page or a simple error message that read: “Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for details.”

CITY PROVIDES UPDATES. At about 8:20 p.m., the city posted a press release regarding the outage.

“The City of Bardstown recently experienced a network disruption that is currently impacting certain operations and causing some of our information systems to be offline. While we are working to resolve this issue, some online services may be unavailable and Bardstown Connect customers may experience temporary disruption to internet connectivity. Importantly, emergency response services and other critical infrastructure are operating as usual.

Our Information Technology department is working diligently to address the issue and restore our information systems as quickly as possible. While we do not have a concrete estimate of when that may occur for all of our IT functions, we currently anticipate based on the information available at this time that any connectivity issues for Bardstown Connect customers to be resolved soon.
We are setting up workarounds to help minimize disruption and to allow us to continue to conduct business to the greatest extent possible. We appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this situation.”

This story will be updated when additional information becomes available.

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