Sedgwick County reports multi-day credit card processing outage at county offices

Sedgwick County officials reported on Sept. 25 that a recent vendor migration to a cloud system led to intermittent and, at times, complete outages of credit card processing at several county facilities. Lindsay Powerso, the county chief financial officer, told the board that the vendor's migration caused repeated outages beginning about two weeks earlier and that reporting functions used to route payments to the correct county funds were intermittently unavailable.

"For about a week, we were completely unable to process any credit card payments at any of our locations," Powerso said. She said county finance and IT staff created internal tracking sheets so departments could manually record payments while the vendor's reporting function was down. When the vendor later allowed limited transactions, county staff still could not always confirm successful processing or accounting for those payments.

Scott Wagner, the county chief information officer, said web-based payments were restored about four days after the initial incident but that in-person networking and terminal functions continued to experience problems. "We hit a snag here for the last two weeks, which is unacceptable," Wagner said, adding that the vendor made an ambitious migration that produced the instability.

The county said the vendor now allows an emergency backup arrangement but that bringing that backup fully online and completing required back-end programming will take more time. In the meantime, departments are accepting cash and checks where possible; officials said signage is posted at affected locations and county strategic communications staff post daily updates on social media.

Nicole Gibbs, director of Strategic Communications, said the county is advising residents to confirm payment options with the office they plan to visit and is posting signage at sites that can accept alternative payments. "If those departments are able to take alternative payments, we recommend that you bring those," Gibbs said.

Commissioners asked for a post-incident review once services are restored. Commissioner Allen said the county should document lessons learned about testing and fallback plans so a vendor migration cannot produce a prolonged inability to accept payments. Powerso and Wagner told commissioners that, based on their review to date, the outages were caused by the vendor's migration and not by county actions.

County leaders said they are working with the vendor, monitoring the restoration effort, and will keep the public informed through daily updates and posted signage. The board did not take formal action on the payment-processing update.