Crash hinders town’s computer capabilities | www.palmbeachdailynews.com

Stuff happens, even to the best of us. The Town of Palm Beach is overcoming a major computer network crash, which also affected their website. I remember about ten years ago, I was doing research in Town Hall on some archived computer files. After a couple days of tedium working through a technician who had to manually search individual computer files for me, I brought what was then something new. That new thing as a thumb drive. He plugged it in to their system and I was able to copy data in bulk and it took about 1 minute, instead of hours. When I came back the next day, their IT guy didn't appreciate the concept and we weren't allowed to do it that way again. That's not what happened here, but the Town of Palm Beach runs a tight ship and I am sure that this was frustrating for everyone involved. Click title for link to a Shiny Sheet article.

“Email and many other systems that we use for collecting and managing data — all of those are affected by this,” Elwell said. “Employees are not able to do their work in the manner they are used to doing it each day. There is a lot of adaptation. Things are being done by hand-processing and mobile devices.”

One aspect of the system that failed is a security feature called authentication, the system that people with passwords use to get into the system.

The crash occurred after data was transferred from one server to another.

“When the migration was complete, and when they made the cut-over, inexplicably we lost our authentication, so the systems shut down,” Elwell said.