Phone lines down at Shasta County courthouse, jurors advised to check status online

Phone lines at Shasta County Superior Court went down Sunday night and could remain offline for the rest of this week, according to one court official.

Court officials cannot receive calls or make outgoing phone calls, according to Melissa Fowler Bradley, court executive officer.

The phone system is hosted out of Los Angeles. The servers were hit with a ransomware attack over the weekend that left phones down since Sunday night, Fowler Bradley said Tuesday. "I am told it might be like this all week before the servers are restored," she said in an email.

Jurors should go online to the Shasta County Superior Court at www.shasta.courts.ca.gov to see if they are required to appear for jury duty, Fowler Bradley said.

Jurors can click on the "jury service" blue button on the top left, that will take them to the Jury Services page, scroll down to "jury reporting instructions" and click, Fowler Bradley said.  The information is updated by 5:30 p.m. each day, she said.

She did not indicate the outage was due to the CrowdStrike outage Friday that affected computer systems around the world.

Much of the world faced online disarray Friday as a widespread technology outage affected companies and services across industries — grounding flights, knocking banks and hospital systems offline and keeping media outlets off the air.

At the heart of the massive disruption was CrowdStrike , a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack, according to the Associated Press.

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This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Phone lines down at Shasta County courthouse, jurors advised to check status online