Tallahassee, Florida, officials said a cyberattack hit parts of the city’s technology environment Friday, knocking the city website offline and prompting Leon County to cut a network link as a precaution.
The city said its systems alerted staff Friday morning to an attack affecting parts of its technology environment. Assistant City Manager Christian Doolin told the mayor and city commissioners that staff moved to isolate the threat and that there were no operational impacts at that time, though periodic downtime was possible during maintenance.
By Friday afternoon, the city’s public website was returning an error page. A city customer service representative told the Tallahassee Democrat that technicians were working on repairs but did not have an estimated restoration time. The newspaper also reported that Leon County temporarily disconnected its network link with the city to prevent the incident from spreading and warned county staff to expect outages involving computer-aided dispatch, geographic information systems and other city-county applications.
Officials have confirmed a cyberattack, but they have not publicly said whether ransomware was involved, whether any data was taken, or which systems beyond the website and linked applications were affected.
Doolin said staff were validating containment, reviewing registries and scheduled tasks, and analyzing access across environments. No ransomware group had publicly claimed responsibility as of publication, and the city did not respond to an email from DysruptionHub seeking additional details.
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The potential impact on shared systems matters because Leon County describes Tallahassee-Leon County GIS as a joint city-county enterprise database and says its technology office also supports law enforcement and first-responder systems used by the sheriff’s office, Tallahassee police, Florida State University police and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Tallahassee’s outage fits a broader pattern of municipal cyber incidents this year in which governments have kept core operations running while isolating networks and sorting out the scope of damage. In Colebrook, New Hampshire, a hacked town email prompted the state to cut some connected systems, disrupting clerk, DMV, records and dispatch access. In State College, Pennsylvania, a contained cyberattack left offices open but slowed email and affected a regional agency tied to borough IT. In Cocoa, Florida, city IT problems disrupted systems while officials emphasized that 911 remained operational.
Tallahassee is Florida’s capital and had an estimated population of 205,089 in 2024, making the outage significant for a city that anchors state government and regional public services in Leon County.
By late Friday, the city had not publicly identified the systems affected beyond the website and linked applications, said whether any data was taken, or provided a timeline for full restoration.
