Power outage leads to no phones, emails for City of El Paso employees

Monday was a tough to do business if you work for the City of El Paso or if you’re trying to do business with the City.

A power outage around 8 a.m. resulted in the phones not working and problems with the City’s computer system, including sending and receiving emails.

Usually when this happens, an alarm goes off that tells people the generator is now running, and they’ll need to switch to the back-up system. But no alarm went off. So the generator ran out of gas.

By noon, the City and El Paso Electric had the issue sorted out and the power turned back on.

But because of the number of networks that needed to reboot, many City employees were unable to receive any calls or send an email the entire day.

Police also were unable to look up records.

“It’s not an on and off switch,” said the City’s IT Interim Director Enrique Martinez, “there’s multiple servers and network equipment out there. Right now we’re back up and running, and that’s the good thing.”

Because the City and County share data centers parts of County buildings Downtown also had IT problems.

City officials say people paying taxes shouldn’t have a problem since they do have the option of paying at Wells Fargo.