Suffolk County website, Wi-Fi crash after rodent chews through cable

Suffolk County's website was temporarily down Tuesday as an animal chewed through an aboveground fiber optic cable, impacting some county systems, officials said.

The county website and Wi-Fi in some county offices went down around 1 p.m. and appeared to be restored by 3 p.m.

Legislative Presiding Officer Kevin McCaffrey (R-Lindenhurst) said he was told the line had been severed in Hauppauge. A crew was dispatched to the cable and discovered an animal, likely a rodent, had infested the area and chewed through the line.

“I know it's hard to believe, but that’s what I'm being told,” McCaffrey said. “It has since been repaired, and our website and all the other services that were affected due to that outage have been restored.” 

Marykate Guilfoyle, a spokeswoman for Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, confirmed McCaffrey's account.

She said the outages were unrelated to disruptions to the county’s 911 emergency call system on Monday that were blamed on failed Verizon equipment. The 911 service was restored Tuesday morning.

Residents with nonemergency requests were encouraged to call 311 while the website was down Tuesday afternoon, she said.

A ransomware attack was not suspected, Guilfoyle said. Suffolk County was the victim of a cyberattack discovered in September 2022 that exposed the Social Security numbers of about 26,000 county employees, delayed payments to vendors and took services offline — some of which have yet to be restored.

Suffolk County Comptroller John Kennedy said his office was undertaking a cash management operating run — essentially paying the county’s bills — when the Wi-Fi went out. He said he used a backup hot spot to finish transferring the funds.

“I am going to permanently put a backup hot spot for cash management to fall back on,” Kennedy said. “We have to do something to make sure we are not stranded in this new reality.”

By Vera Chinese

vera.chinese@newsday.com@VeraChinese

Vera Chinese covers Suffolk County government and politics. She joined Newsday in 2017 after working as an editor for the East End lifestyle publication northforker and a general assignment reporter for the New York Daily News.