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Culpeper officials say network rebuilt, rescind IT state of emergency after June outage
Summary
IT officials told the board the county has moved operations from antiquated equipment to a segmented, modern network and the board voted to rescind the IT state of emergency declared after the June 5, 2025 outage; presenters said remediation stayed within the $2.85 million emergency allocation and that public‑safety systems were prioritized.
County IT leaders told the Board of Supervisors that the county’s network failure in June 2025 was triggered by a routine hardware swap that exposed decade‑old, under‑documented infrastructure and cascading topology problems. Matt Comar (speaker 12) described the outage as caused by an attempted hardware swap on June 5, 2025 that collapsed an aging core network and required an emergency rebuild and extensive remediation.
Jesse Martin (speaker 15) summarized the county’s operational response and the path to recovery. He said the county stood up a parallel, modern segmented network, migrated workloads to the new network, hardened public‑safety connectivity, and implemented monitoring, endpoint protections and cloud‑based identity. Martin said the board‑approved emergency rebuild allocation of $2,850,000 has not been exceeded for hardware remediation; in addition about $399,000 in grant funds were secured to offset public‑safety hardening costs.
Comar detailed discovery challenges: lack of network documentation, many unmanaged endpoints, decade‑old consumer‑grade equipment, and inconsistent licensing that complicated fail‑back plans. "We were living on a decade‑old mistake of half measures," he said, describing the work as operating in a high‑risk, close‑to‑failure posture until the new segmented network was brought online. He said 911 continuity was prioritized during migration and that subsequent site‑by‑site moves have restored operations and reduced the single‑point failures that previously threatened the entire county network.
Following the briefing, Supervisor (speaker 4) moved and the board seconded rescinding the IT state of emergency effective immediately; the motion passed by voice vote and the chair announced the state of emergency was rescinded. Board members thanked IT staff and public‑safety partners for the year‑long remediation effort and asked staff to map a multi‑year IT maintenance and replacement plan to avoid future failures.
