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Hood County IT says switch failure left office phones out for about seven hours; no written disaster recovery plan
Summary
County IT told Hood County commissioners that a power-over-Ethernet component failure disabled about 10–15 office phones on April 14; staff restored service with a surplus switch by about 3 p.m. and agreed to provide a written after-action report. IT said there is no written county business-continuity or disaster-recovery plan for the affected systems.
Hood County IT briefed the Commissioners Court on April 14 after a hardware failure in a network switch left roughly 10–15 office phones without service for about seven hours.
Chris, an IT staff member, told the court that the problem was “only the switch … providing power over Ethernet to those phones,” and that Cisco support could not determine the failure from switch logs because the device continued to report it was providing power even though it was not. Chris said a surplus switch was configured and put into service and “by 03:00, all the phones and the offices were up.”
Why it matters: several affected extensions belonged to units that support emergency response and county services, including the IT department, 911 addressing, the fire marshal’s office and the sheriff’s office. Commissioners pressed staff about whether a similar failure could hit dispatch; Chris said it could affect nonemergency calls, but the TAC-managed 911 trunking system is separate and would likely have taken longer to restore because regional technicians are not on site.
County staff described the immediate impact: a few employees’ desktop PCs were plugged into desk phones and therefore lost network connectivity until staff plugged PCs directly into wall jacks; Chris said that affected “only 2 people.” He estimated the outage ran from about 8:00 a.m. until about 3:00 p.m., “roughly” seven hours.
On planning and prevention, Chris told the court there is no written disaster recovery plan for the county’s non‑TAC phone systems and that IT needs a county business‑continuity plan to build a formal disaster‑recovery process. He told commissioners he would prepare and provide a written after‑action report to the court.
The court had no further action on the IT briefing at the meeting; the judge thanked Chris for the update and the body moved on to executive session.
Quotes from the record: “We investigated, … the issue was only the switch … providing power over Ethernet to those phones.” — Chris, IT staff. “We do not [have a written disaster recovery plan]. Before we can come up with a disaster recovery plan, we need the county to have a business continuity plan that we can build our disaster recovery plan off of.” — Chris, IT staff.
Next steps: IT will deliver the promised written after‑action report to the court and the commissioners indicated they expect follow-up on whether countywide business‑continuity planning is needed.
