TAMPA, Fla. — It was right around the time when polls were due to close around 7 p.m. Tuesday night when Craig Latimer says he noticed the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections website was not working properly.
“We noticed it started working slowly,” Latimer said.
Shortly after, the site was down completely. The same went for the rest of the local Supervisor of Election websites in the state.
“We were aware of it. We were aware of it as soon as it happened,” Florida's Secretary of State Cord Byrd said.
He says although the site was down, it had absolutely no impact on getting election results. He reemphasized it only impacted the public-facing sites.
“It was with county-level, public-facing websites that were having problems. It’s a vendor issue and we’ll get to the bottom of it,” Byrd said.
The vendor is VR Systems. The Tallahassee-based company provided election-related software to most of Florida’s 67 supervisors of elections.
VR Systems Chief Operating Officer Ben Martin sent a statement to Latimer on Wednesday saying:
“We share everyone’s sense of urgency to identify why people may have experienced problems accessing our customer’s website. First and foremost, the election night reporting of the unofficial results was not impacted and there is no indication of malicious activity.”
Martin went on to explain how they immediately put a full team to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. The county’s SOE websites looked to be back up and running by 10 p.m.
“Based on our analysis of today’s event, we believe the logging that was enabled as a security measure was at the root of the issues that our customers experienced. This log records the action on the content management system serving our customers’ websites. Late in the day, it began to grow exponentially due to the increase in traffic to the websites. We believe this put extraordinary stress on the system,” Martin wrote in the statement. “With our customers fully restored, we have begun working with external technical experts to assist us with further analyzing and optimizing our system to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”