Fort St. John expects emails will deliver eventually as it ‘works to realize full impacts’ of cyber incident

FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. — Staff members with the City of Fort St. John are still working hard to confirm exactly what data has been impacted by the “cyber incident” that’s been affecting its network since earlier this week.

In the meantime, however, communications manager Ryan Harvey says the city’s email services are still impacted by the incident, but any emails sent to the city will still reach their destination eventually.

“The expectation is that, if an email has been sent, it will still be delivered when services are resumed on that front,” he said. 

“A lot of the processes, currently, are in a bit of a holding pattern,” Harvey added. “We’re working to resume normal business operations, or as close to normal business operations as we can, as soon as possible.”

The city first put out a notice to residents about the incident on Tuesday, February 25th, saying it was “severely” impacting some services.

Since then, Mayor Lilia Hansen provided an update via social media on Wednesday, February 26th, saying recreation facilities were open and City Hall was accepting payments, but that service capacity remained “extremely limited.”

In an interview with Energeticcity.ca on Thursday, February 27th, Harvey was unable to confirm the nature of the incident, and said workers are still determining what specific data has been compromised.

“We’re still working to realize the full impacts of the incident, so none of that information, currently, has been able to be confirmed,” Harvey said.

Harvey also wasn’t able to share any specific estimate as to when the situation will be resolved.

“Currently,” he said, “our IT professionals are working to slowly bring up services, and so that process has started and is underway, but unfortunately there’s no timeline on a full resumption of normal services at this time.”

According to Harvey, conversations regarding procedures for services like generating bills in the interim haven’t begun yet.

He claimed the city has completely segregated its network from the wider internet as a safety precaution.

“As a result, [some services] aren’t even accessible internally,” he explained. “So, we couldn’t even generate a bill at this point in time.”

Harvey also confirmed that it’s completely safe for residents to visit the city’s website, since it’s hosted externally and isn’t connected to the city’s internal network.

Residents with questions or concerns, or those looking to report urgent issues like water main breaks and sewer backups, are urged to call (778) 256-0076 or reach out to city staff through social media.