Officials said courthouses and other systems in Georgia’s most populous county were hacked over the weekend, disrupting daily operations, but the district attorney’s office said the extortion case against former President Donald Trump was not resolved. He said there was no impact.
Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta, has suffered a “widespread outage” due to a “cybersecurity incident,” County Commission Chairman Rob Pitts said in a video posted to social media on Monday. . In particular, he said the outage is impacting the county’s telephone, court and tax systems.
However, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ office said the extortion case against Trump and others would not be affected.
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Willis’ office said in a statement: “All materials related to election cases are stored on separate, highly secure systems that have not been hacked and are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to gain unauthorized access. It’s designed to be.”
But prosecutors said their operations were “significantly” affected by the outage of the electronic court filing system. Visitors to the website that posts Fulton County’s online court records were shown a message that said it was “temporarily unavailable.”
People walk in front of the Fulton County Courthouse on August 14, 2023 in Atlanta. The county’s systems were hacked over the weekend, still disrupting operations, and it’s unclear when the systems will return to normal, officials announced. (AP Photo/Alex Slitz, File)
The statement also said the Atlanta Police Department does not send emails to or open emails from the District Attorney’s Office due to concerns about its own systems. This was hampering the prosecutor’s work, since about 85% of cases come from Atlanta police.
A Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others in August. They are accused of participating in a broader scheme to illegally overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Plea deals have been reached with prosecutors, and four people have already pleaded guilty. Trump and the rest maintain their innocence.
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Pitts said the disturbance was reported to law enforcement and is under investigation. The Atlanta FBI office confirmed it was aware of the breach and was in contact with the county’s information technology department, but declined to provide further details.
County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt said Tuesday there was no estimate of when power would be restored. Most county offices remained open, but some transactions were limited due to power outages, according to the county’s website.
