Kansas City, Kansas, police, fire non-emergency services impacted by ‘network incident’
An undisclosed “network incident” is affecting some of Kansas City, Kansas, fire and police departments’ non-emergency services, a police spokeswoman said.
“All emergency public safety services are fully functional, and response times are not impacted,” said Nancy Chartrand, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department.
For now, all email services for the police and fire departments are down, she said. The email outage also affected the animal control services in Kansas City, Kansas, which are part of the police department.
The police department reported the network incident early Tuesday morning, Chartrand said. A team was investigating the cause.
A list of the non-emergency services affected by the network incident was not immediately available.
Chartrand said she didn’t know if the network incident was due to a cyberattack, but said she would release more information as it becomes available.
Cyberattacks and computer security breaches are a growing problem both locally and nationally.
The Kansas City government appears to be still recovering from what they called a computer outage earlier this month. While the city’s website was restored nearly two weeks ago and KC Water’s online and phone payment system was restored Friday, online access to the city’s online planning and permitting services CompassKC still produces “server error” messages.
“We apologize for any inconvenience but CompassKC is currently unavailable,” an online message said. “We are working diligently to get it available again.”
Other attacks include a ransomware attack that affected the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority in January and another one that affected Jackson County’s assessment, collections and records of deeds offices in April.
The metro’s Kansas City Scout traffic information system has not been returned online since a cyberattack on April 25. The system’s dynamic message boards, website and cameras connected to KC Scout remain offline.
