LANSING ? A disaster recovery test at the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget turned into a disaster when a link to a mainframe computer was broken at noon Wednesday crashing the computers at many state offices, including 131 Secretary of State branch offices, until 5 pm Thursday.
State employees and contractors worked around the clock to fix the broken link, and purge some corrupted files that were sent to the mainframe, said spokesman Kurt Weiss.
?A fiber link was broken by a state employee,? he said ?We were working on a disaster recovery test, performing a test on the mainframe. During the test we went from test to real life disaster. The cord between testing and real life was severed. Corrupted files got loaded on the mainframe, and we crashed the mainframe.?
To make it up to residents who attempted to do business as the Secretary of State?s office, the offices will be open until 7 pm on Friday and Monday, and until 2 pm on Saturday. People who were in line during the outages also received passes to move to the head of the line the next time they come to the Secretary of State?s offices.
Gov. Snyder, when asked about the outage, said it is another reason why the state has to get the budget approved so the state can focus on upgrading the old computer equipment used by Michigan government. Some of this equipment is more than 30 years old.
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