Service to those sites was restored about 5 p.m.
The outage was caused by a “storage issue in the county system,” Dori Henry, director of county government communications, said.
There was “no external influence or malware attack of any kind,” she said in an emailed response. Hackers demanding ransom shut down some Baltimore City government computer systems for three months earlier this year.
“Everything is backed up, there’s no loss of data,” Henry said. The county’s servers are two to three years old.
The library’s catalog and customer service systems were also affected by the outage. Citizens can use the county’s website to file code enforcement complaints, search for information related to county offices, and pay traffic violations, although that also can be done at another external site.
“In that way it’s affecting some customer services,” Henry said.
The county’s Office of Information Technology is working to resolve the issue, and thinks it may have been caused by “human error,” but “first priority is getting everything” back online before assessing the specific cause, Henry added.
Baltimore Sun reporter Wilborn Nobles III contributed to this story.
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