Cyber ​​incident in Cleveland leads to shutdown of city’s IT systems

The city said it was working to understand the nature and scope of the incident after anomalies were discovered in its IT environment on Monday.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we have closed access to city systems,” the announcement said. Emergency services such as 911 remained operational throughout the incident, as did trash collection, lawn mowing and recreation programs. The city’s municipal court system was also unaffected by the incident.

It’s still unclear if the system outage was the result of a cyberattack, but the city provided a steady stream of updates Monday about which systems were not affected. Officials said local ratepayer data, as well as local utility customer data, were not affected by the incident.

On the day of the incident, the city was just starting its summer program. However, it is still unclear whether the IT shutdown caused any disruptions during the program.

“We will be able to determine the duration of this incident as more information becomes available during the investigation,” the statement said. It continued: “After discovering the incident, we immediately took action to contain any anomalies.”

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb initially described the incident as a “break-in” during a press conference on Monday, local news outlets reported. But the city’s IT commissioner later described the incident as a “cyber event” and said officials would not release further details so as not to jeopardize the investigation.

“This is happening all over the country, from municipalities to large Fortune 500 companies to major healthcare companies,” Bibb told reporters. “We wanted to make sure we contained the crisis, managed it and got back to business as quickly as possible.”