Tallahassee software company takes 'full responsibility' for election websites crashing

The Tallahassee-based company that supports Palm Beach County's Supervisor of Elections website and much of the rest of Florida's elections sites, accepted blame for a glitch that caused the delay of Tuesday's primary results posted online.

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, VR Systems said the glitches affected every client's website that they host, and they "take full responsibility." It is not yet known how many Florida counties were affected and what time all the issues were resolved. VR Systems serves the results web pages for 64 out of 67 Florida county elections sites.

While most sites' results were back up and running fairly soon after polls closed at 7 p.m., Palm Beach and Lake counties were the last to see results posted. Palm Beach County was forced to direct people to an alternate web page that displayed results in pdf formats. Results on the Palm Beach County's Supervisor of Elections website was restored around 10:15 p.m., according to the office.

In a press briefing Tuesday evening, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd made clear there were no problems with the data or vote tallies being transmitted to the Department of State. He said it was a county-level issue, and there was "no evidence at this juncture" that the technical difficulties were because of a cyber attack.

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday said he was "not familiar" and "wasn't necessarily aware" of the website issues that happened and directed questions to Byrd.

"I know Cord will press the issue because one of the things that Florida stands apart from the rest of this country is you actually have the results by like 9 o'clock on election night," DeSantis said. "That's good, that's confidence-inspiring. There's no time for tomfoolery."

He said the state would make sure the system was working for the general election in November.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said she would talk with her office’s information technology staff to determine what the next step is in the county’s relationship with VR Systems. “I don’t want anything like this to happen again, ever, especially not a during a general election," she said.

VR Systems said they suffered "extraordinary stress."

"We believe the logging that was enabled as a security measure was at the root of the issues that our customers experienced," VR Systems said on Tuesday evening.

Logging means the automatic recording of everything that happens on a website, such as who's using it and how, including which pages are viewed and what information is downloaded.

"Late in the day, (the logging) began to grow exponentially due to the increase in traffic to the websites," the company added.

Even before the first polls closed at 7 p.m., many Floridians were forced to bypass their county election supervisors' websites on Tuesday night and find results elsewhere.

VR Systems said the glitches weren't a sign of malicious activity like hacking and said the websites had been fully restored: "We have begun working with external technical experts to assist us with further analyzing and optimizing our system to ensure this doesn’t happen again."

In 2016, VR Systems was also the victim of cyberattack attempts by Russia to influence the U.S. presidential election, according to published reports and local election officials.

Hackers with the Russian military sent phishing emails posing as VR Systems employees to local government organizations, according to leaked National Security Agency documents. Phishing refers to hackers luring people into opening harmless looking email attachments that contain malicious programs.

As previously reported in June of 2017 , information taken in the attack — perhaps including email contacts of VR Systems’ clients — was likely used to launch a subsequent hacking operation in the fall. Russian hackers reportedly sent a malicious email from an account called “vr.elections@gmail.com” to up to 122 local government offices.

At the time, Mindy Perkins, CEO of VR Systems, said in a statement there was no sign the intended victims were compromised.

Ana Goñi-Lessan , state watchdog reporter for the USA TODAY Network – Florida, can be reached at agonilessan@gannett.com .

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Tallahassee software company takes 'full responsibility' for election websites crashing