A man approaches the Minnehaha County Treasurer’s Office in Sioux Falls on Aug. 20, 2025, the second day on which a power outage shut down access to state records. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
South Dakota’s court system declared a judicial emergency Wednesday in response to an ongoing outage of state websites, data portals and communication systems.
Since Tuesday, people in and outside the judicial system have been unable to get court records or court dates, file documents like protection orders, trial motions, civil lawsuits or small claims cases. Public access points like ecourts.sd.us remain inaccessible, and court system employees can’t access records through their own non-public information portals.
The court system is also unable to take electronic payments of fines, though a press release from the Unified Judicial System said clerks can take payments in person.
The judicial emergency suspends “all deadlines, time schedules, due dates and filing requirements imposed by applicable statutes, rules and court orders” until ordered by the court.
Power outages across South Dakota government stymie services statewide
The emergency declaration is part of the fallout from a power outage in the state’s data center, which is the term used by the Bureau of Information Technology to describe the hardware scattered across the state and connected through the state’s network.
Driver’s license exam stations and self-service kiosks remained inaccessible Wednesday, as did vehicle registration and vehicle licensing, birth and death records and the state’s voter registration database.
Law enforcement has been affected, as well. Faulk County Sheriff Kurt Hall said his dispatch was unable to run license plate and warrant checks for deputies doing traffic stops for most of Tuesday.
“We couldn’t run plates yesterday, but we can today,” said Hall, whose office polices a county of 2,100 and runs a 32-bed jail.
Law enforcement has been affected, as well. Faulk County Sheriff Kurt Hall said his dispatch was unable to run license plate and warrant checks for deputies doing traffic stops for most of Tuesday.
Minnehaha County Sheriff Mike Milstead, who oversees the deputies patrolling South Dakota’s most populous county and one of its largest jails, said state system services have been spotty at best and mostly inaccessible. Metro Communications, which dispatches for both the county and the Sioux Falls Police Department, has been able to communicate with law enforcement, even as some state resources have been unavailable.
Milstead’s office has relied on its local warrants database for information, but adding warrants to the system has been cumbersome with the state court system down. Deputies have had to hand-deliver court information for warrants, he said, and for orders to release jail inmates from custody.
“This is certainly demonstrating how dependent we are on the state network,” Milstead said, adding that he can’t recall an outage that’s lasted as long as this one in the years since his office has been using it.
Attorney General Marty Jackley, who oversees the state Division of Criminal Investigation, said Wednesday that his office has also been impacted, as the consumer protection division is unable to process complaints.
Jackley’s office also oversees the State Automated Victim Notification System, through which victims or the public can sign up for alerts about court dates, incarceration status or release dates for people accused or convicted of crimes. That SAVIN system wasn’t sending out alerts as of Wednesday.
Milstead said “we still have processes in place” to notify victims using the information held on local servers without SAVIN.
“That’s kind of a check and balance, not in every case, but in most cases,” Milstead said. “I would call it more of a workaround, but the jail still does victim notification if we have a victim on file.”
The Bureau of Information Technology’s spokesperson, Lisa Rahja, said in an email that the state is continuing its work to mitigate the power outage that “affected all state hosted services and some network communications.”
She wrote that the state engineer’s office has investigated the “root cause” of the outage, and that “recovery efforts are a top priority.”
The power outage wasn’t caused by a cybersecurity breach, she wrote.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a developing story and may be updated as new information becomes available.
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