Elections websites restored following ‘cyber incident’ in most Florida counties

Elections supervisors’ websites throughout the state that were down Tuesday night are back up and running, the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office said.

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A spokesperson added that elections officials were pleased that the incident did not impact unofficial results for races, which were posted around 9 p.m.

Supervisor of Elections Glen Gilzean told Channel 9 that his office had recently taken steps to harden their cyber infrastructure.

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Eyewitness News learned that the “cyber incident” affected 59 of 67 counties in Florida.

Sources told WFTV it appeared to be an issue involving a vendor, not an issue with the state or individual counties.

READ: 2024 Florida Primary: Elections results

In Orange County, election results likely won’t be certified and become official until later this week.

VR Systems provided Channel 9 with the following statement about “intermittent downtime and slowness” of elections supervisor websites on the evening of the Florida Primary:

“We share everyone’s sense of urgency to identify why people may have experienced problems accessing our customers’ websites. First and foremost, the election night reporting of the unofficial results was not impacted, and there is no indication of malicious activity.

“Some counties reported that their websites were experiencing intermittent downtime and slowness. We know the public expects responsive websites, and we immediately assigned a full team to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. We have now fully restored our customers’ websites.

“Based on our analysis of today’s event, we believe the logging that was enabled as a security measure was at the root of the issues that our customers experienced. This log records the action on the content management system serving our customers’ websites. Late in the day, it began to grow exponentially due to the increase in traffic to the websites. We believe this put extraordinary stress on the system.

“While we worked to fix the issue, we had to ensure the public could access election night reporting through our customers’ websites. To do this, we created and posted a webpage available to the public that included links to the unofficial election night results posted by each county.

With our customer’s websites 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.”

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