Providence city email system down for third consecutive day

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — The city of Providence’s email system is out of fee for a third enterprise day this week, with authorities workers from City Hall to the police division impacted by the community outage.

Providence workers have been unable to entry their emails and different municipal techniques since noon Tuesday.

“Over the final a number of days, the city has skilled community points that affected our email communications in addition to billing and cost capabilities,” stated Ben Smith, a spokesperson for Mayor Jorge Elorza. “Our IT workforce is working rapidly to revive these providers as quickly as potential.”

The skill to pay taxes on-line gave the impression to be restored Thursday afternoon.

There was no rapid phrase on a explanation for the difficulty, however Smith stated “there is no such thing as a proof of ransomware being put in.”

The outage prompted a gathering of the City Council Finance Committee to be canceled on Wednesday, as supplies had been unable to be circulated.

The Providence Police Department can also be affected by the outage. In addition to no entry to email, Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré stated the cell terminals in police autos should not working.

However, Paré described the scenario as extra of a nuisance than a severe concern, for the reason that city’s computerized dispatch system continues to be up and working.

“The officers don’t have distant entry, however they do have the quaint method to name into dispatch,” he stated. “We had an alternate system earlier than cell techniques, that’s calling on police radio to our dispatch.”

“It’s actually not environment friendly for us administratively,” he added. “We depend on expertise and generally we’ve hiccups.”

The Providence Public School District is on a separate email server and isn’t affected by the outage.