MCAO candidates lose time gathering signatures as Secretary of State website experiences outage

Arizona's Secretary of State’s Office experienced a system-wide outage that appears to be caused by a hardware malfunction, and although it was only down for a couple of hours, it had big a impact on those running for the vacant Maricopa County Attorney’s position.

MARICOPA COUNTY, Ariz. - Arizona's Secretary of State’s Office experienced a system-wide outage that appears to be caused by a hardware malfunction, and although it was only down for a couple of hours, it had big a impact on those running for the vacant Maricopa County Attorney’s position.

Candidates have until Monday, April 4 to get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, and they use this website to gather those signatures. They were already under a tight deadline, and say every minute the website was down today could impact their final counts.

Rachel Mitchell is running for county attorney and says, "So for that to go down, so people can’t sign the petition is very critical because that’s the way we get on the ballot. That’s the way we continue the conversation."

A two-hour outage may not seem like much, but it could make all the difference.

"I went in for an update on the count we had some really good momentum going this morning. A lot of signatures coming in and everybody started really blowing up my phone saying, ‘I’m getting an error message,’ and we reached out to the elections department and found out that the Secretary of State website had gone down," Mitchell explained.

Another county attorney hopeful, Gina Godbehere, told FOX 10 in a statement, "The Secretary of State's office is a mess. Having the online signatures portal go down just days before the deadline is disappointing and inexcusable."

In total, candidates need more than 4,000 signatures to be on the ballot, getting them either in person or through the website.

Around 10 a.m. the Secretary of State's office posted on Twitter saying it had a system-wide outage that appeared to be caused by a hardware malfunction. The outage also impacted in-person candidate filings.

The issue was resolved just before 12:30 p.m.

"There's always speculation around every outage as to whether it was something that was planned or wasn't planned. There are scheduled maintenance processes for just about anything that's public facing. But, usually, they're trying to do these things in the middle of the night when nobody's really trying to use the resources, so obviously they had some type of problem. Thankfully they figured it out, but it's bound to happen again," said Ken Colburn with Data Doctors, a networking solutions firm.

The Secretary of State's office says there were no security issues and the voter registration database runs on a separate system.