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SALT LAKE CITY -- The State of Utah's website was down for nearly four hours Friday morning -- meaning online services for the state health department, motor vehicles, even the highway patrol weren't working.
The system is now back up and running, but state computer programmers faced some tense moments. Their biggest concerns: What went wrong and how do they fix it?
If you tried going to utah.gov you saw either an error message, a message saying the network was down, or your connection just timed out.
Stephen Fletcher, Utah's Chief Information Officer, says, "Routing problems are probably the most complex of anything on the network."
Fletcher is in charge of Utah.gov. When the site went down for nearly four hours, beginning at 8 a.m., more than 900 state online services couldn't be accessed.
Fletcher says, "We have a huge amount of traffic; and yes, that's part of our responsibility is to make sure they can have access to it."
That includes certified public accounts like Lee Steiger, who uses the state website for tax forms.
He says, "I didn't realize until today how dependent I am upon it."
Since it's Friday, with the four-day state workweek, he couldn't call anyone at state offices.
"There's nobody there," he says. "I'm sure on Monday they'll have an earful."
The down network affected UHP troopers as well. They couldn't access information on their system, so they had to go back to the old way of doing reports.
Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Kellie Oaks says, "Crash reports, incident reports and citations, plus we couldn't run drivers licenses and warrant checks on those we interacted with."
So what happened? Basically, the normal flow of information was interrupted, but it was a planned interruption for maintenance. That meant rerouting the flow through a backup data center. However, that backup failed, even though it passed recent tests.
Programmers fixed it, but Fletcher wants to know why it failed.
He says, "It's still frustrating because we thought we were good to go. We had the alternate pass in place. We had the ability to go to another data center, and it didn't work."
Fletcher says Utah.gov is the most popular state website in the country, getting more than 1 million unique hits a month. So when it goes down, a lot of people notice fast.
Fletcher says his team will hold a meeting to figure out why the problem happened.
E-mail: acabrero@ksl.com
