Local authorities in Jefferson County, in the US state of Alabama, are unable to perform basic financial operations after a single server supporting its SAP system crashed.
The county has been unable to make payments to its suppliers since Tuesday and a financial audit has been delayed as a result of the malfunction, local news site Al.com reports.
County manager Tony Petelos said that the servers running are SAP at the county have all reached ‘end of life’, and if one fails the rest cannot take the strain. "When one server crashes it causes the whole system to go down," he said.
In November last year, Jefferson County filed for bankruptcy after accumulating $3.1 billion-worth of debt relating to sewer works. Last month it axed over 700 jobs. Al.com reports that the county’s IT department has lost 30 staff in the past year.
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"You do away with people and you do away with outside maintenance contracts that take care of that proprietary equipment, and you’re left with the inability to operate government," commissioner Jimmie Stephens said following the outage.
