Gardner mayor urges residents to re-register for Code Red after vendor migration
Summary
The mayor said Gardner migrated its Code Red emergency-notification list after a vendor breach, warned a default recall setting caused multiple test calls, said engineers fixed it and asked residents to re-register and check phone formatting to ensure they receive parking-ban and emergency alerts.
Mayor (name not given in transcript) said Gardner migrated users into a new Code Red emergency-notification system after the vendor's private service was compromised in a national hack and urged residents to re-register to ensure they receive parking-ban and emergency alerts.
He described a system default that repeatedly recalled numbers if calls went to voicemail or were disconnected: "it was auto set to recall that number up to 5 times every 5 minutes until you picked up the phone or you hit your 5 minute limit there." The repeated test notifications produced multiple calls; "We did not mean to call you 20 times, but that was just the auto part of the system," he said. The mayor said the city worked with Code Red's software engineers and "that is no longer the case. So you should only get 1 call every time a call is issued, from here on out." He advised residents who did not receive prior parking-ban calls to re-register.
The mayor also noted a migration-format issue that dropped a digit when numbers were moved into the new system if they were stored with a "+1" prefix ("if you preregistered with a +1 978 number instead of just starting with 978, it dropped your last digit"). He said city staff corrected the migration and asked residents to verify their numbers on the city's Code Red registration page.
The announcement covers notifications for parking bans and other emergencies; the mayor framed the re-registration step as necessary to prevent missed alerts and tickets during parking bans and other time-sensitive incidents.
