Mariposa County says systems restored after Feb. 2 outage; no evidence of cyberattack

Anthony Rios, Mariposa County's technical services manager, told the Board of Supervisors on Feb. 17 that a countywide technology outage on Feb. 2 was caused by an "accidental loop" in the network created during routine weekend work.

"Systems are restored, and the county is operating as normal," Rios said. He added there was "no sign of a cyber attack" and no indication of hardware failure or data loss. Rios gave a timeline: the incident was first noticed at about 6:00 a.m. on Feb. 2, critical systems were restored around 8:00 p.m. that day, and full restoration was completed about 10:00 a.m. the following day.

Rios told supervisors the loop flooded the county network and destabilized the server platform. Technical staff restored services in stages to avoid a second outage and used workarounds while recovery proceeded. He said the county has updated outage response plans, posted quick‑reference checklists in the data center, and is accelerating a planned network modernization that includes implementing expanded spanning tree protocol to prevent future loops and moving some services from VMware to Hyper‑V.

Lee Westerland, assistant county administrative officer, and board members praised the technical services team for their response and coordination. Westerland said county leadership called department heads during the incident to assess impacts and maintain services, and noted creative workarounds such as using Starlink from county vehicles to preserve connectivity for critical operations.

Rios said the county will also deploy early‑warning monitoring and backup systems for core network services and will meet biweekly with external engineering support to accelerate those plans.

The county's update did not identify any loss of public records or evidence of malicious activity; officials said they will continue monitoring and implementing safeguards to reduce the chance of recurrence.