City of Columbus hit with data breach, internet outage

The city of Columbus faced two digital problems Thursday, which they are say are unrelated, but both limiting city computer systems.

According to the city, Columbus government computers have been the victim of a cyberattack. The incident started with an intrusion into the systems Wednesday evening but the city IT department caught the breach and took steps to immediately limit access to information to the hackers. City officials say no credit card or banking information within the city was compromised in the breach.

The city says that the breach is being investigated by the department and Mike Richardson, director of security and risk for the city.

Richardson calls this an “isolated incident” and says the city is “taking measures to put further safeguards in place to mitigate future risk to the city’s cyber infrastructure.”

Officials say that in an unrelated incident, the city government has been working through an Internet outage. All city offices have been affected by the outage today. City payments and online services have not been available and the city email has been taken down by the outage.

They say that the occurrence of the outage and the system breach are coincidental.

As of late Thursday, the city was still working through the issues.