Nassau government website suffers hours-long outage

Nassau County's website was down for more than three hours in the middle of the day Thursday, leaving residents without the ability to access property records, court filings and other government documents. 

Some sections of the site were restored at 4 p.m., but the homepage of the county Clerk's Office still read: "Due to a network outage the County Clerk Court File Requisition System is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience."

It was not immediately clear what caused the hours-long outage. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman's office did not respond to questions about the outage. The office did not mention the outage on its social media channels. 

It was unclear which functions of the site were operating as of 5:30 p.m.

The secure website to pay fines for red-light camera and school bus camera tickets appeared to be functioning. 

Democratic Minority Leader Legis. Delia DeRiggi-Whitton (D-Glen Cove) slammed the administration's handling of the incident, saying the "lack of transparency is unacceptable."

"Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has failed at even the most basic of tasks: keeping the public informed about the state of our county website," DeRiggi-Whitton said. "For several hours constituents have been unable to access essential government services, and there has been absolutely zero communication from his office."

At about 12:30 p.m., county employees received an email from the information technology department that read: "We are currently experiencing network connectivity issues and IT is actively working to resolve. We will keep you updated. We apologize for any inconvenience."

The function of public information systems and cyber security has been of great interest on Long Island since Suffolk County in September 2022 was the target of one of the largest ransomware attacks against a U.S. municipality. 

The event took down critical county systems, exposed the personal information of about 470,000 residents and 26,000 past and current employees, impacted the police dispatch services for weeks and shut down the county's main website for months. 

Nothing that occurred in Nassau, however, has indicated there was an attack of that nature. 

By Candice Ferrette

candice.ferrette@newsday.comcandiceferrette

Candice Ferrette covers Nassau County government and politics on Long Island. She has been a reporter at Newsday since 2011.