An equal justice statue sits outside the doors of the Minnehaha County Courthouse in Sioux Falls. (Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
The South Dakota court system has rescinded a judicial emergency sparked by a state communications outage that lasted more than 24 hours.
The outage made it impossible for court employees to access court records and court schedules, file documents or take electronic payments for fines. The emergency declaration suspended deadlines across the state.
The state’s network began to come back online Wednesday afternoon.
State network begins to come back online after second day of failures
A Thursday press release from the Unified Judicial System said the emergency was rescinded “after carefully monitoring current circumstances related to a large-scale technical issue which impacted the State of South Dakota network.”
The state’s Bureau of Information and Technology announced Wednesday that “core” systems like phone lines, state radio, internet access and wireless services were back online, but that “full restoration is still in process.”
During the outage, which began on Tuesday, people couldn’t get vital records, driver’s licenses, vehicle registrations or license plates. For part of the outage, law enforcement was unable to run license plates during traffic stops to check for warrants or access state criminal background records.
The IT bureau has blamed the outage on a power supply problem but did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday morning on the cause of that problem. Previously, it said that the incident was not related to a cybersecurity breach, and that the cause was under investigation.
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