Cause of city’s online outage was local, not global
New information has come to light about the cause of a website and email outage that impacted that City of Marysville on June 8.
As it turns out the issue had nothing to do with a global outage and was rather an unfortunately timed billing mistake. In the scramble to restore online services, city officials incorrectly blamed contracted web developer CivicPlus and global cloud service provider Fastly for the outage.
“It was a bizarre group of circumstances, in one morning,” said Marysville IT Director Aaron Story.
According to the Associated Press, numerous websites across the globe went offline on June 8 because of issues with Fastly cloud storage.
When the City of Marysville experienced online problems that same morning, officials initially felt it was tied to the global outage. Contacted that morning, Story said that the city’s domain name was not working, so visitors could not see the city website and anyone with a marysville.org email address was not receiving e-mail.
Story said at the time that CivicPlus was having issues and believed it was tied to the Fastly outage. He also noted that city representatives were trying unsuccessfully to contact CivicPlus.
At that time, Story did admit that “until we get ahold of CivicPlus to get the real reason, we don’t know much.”
As it turns out, the web developer had nothing to do with problem and is not responsible for hosting the city’s website.
“CivicPlus does not host Marysville internet domain and was not the cause of the Marysville website issue that occurred the morning of June 8, 2021,” a release from the company reads. “CivicPlus does not now, nor has ever, used the service provider Fastly. CivicPlus and all of its clients, including Marysville, OH, were not in any way impacted by the worldwide cloud disruption that occurred in the early hours of June 8, 2021. During that morning all support requests received were taken and responded to in CivicPlus’ normal manner, and all communicated services levels were exceeded.”
In the end, an unpaid bill, in the neighborhood of $30, had led to the city being disconnected from its domain name “marysvilleohio.org.”
“It was just a coincidence that Fastly was down (at the same time),” Story said.
City Law Director Tim Aslaner said the city pays for the use of the domain name every two years and the company hosting the domain switched from paper billing to electronic sometime during the most recent payment period. Aslaner said the city was not notified electronically or by mail that the bill was due.
“It’s something that slipped through the cracks,” Story said.
While trying to verify the source of the outage, city officials identified the payment error and quickly made it right. Web services and email were restored to the city by 10:30 a.m. that morning.
“It was a matter of one phone call and everything was back to normal,” Story said.
Representatives of CivicPlus, however, quickly contacted the city to ensure that they be absolved of blame. The two entities appear to have resolved that issue.
“CivicPlus and Marysville continue to enjoy a successful and rewarding partnership,” the company press release reads.