The vendor for most of Florida’s supervisor of elections websites says a logging error was responsible for the outages that occurred on Election Night. Several local websites were down, causing problems for candidates and the public eagerly awaiting results.
VR Systems has a largely positive track record in the state of Florida. In a statement, the company’s chief operating officer says a log that records activity on websites became overwhelmed by the amount of traffic those websites started receiving. As a result, the log—which was created as a security measure—ultimately led to slowed website response times, and timeouts across many different county websites.
"Based on our analysis of today's event, we believe the logging that was enabled as a security measure was at the root of the issues that our customers experienced," said Ben Martin, VR Systems' Chief Operating Officer.
"This log records the action on the content management system serving our customers' websites. Late in the day, it began to grow exponentially due to the increase in traffic to the websites. We believe this put extraordinary stress on the system."
As an alternative, VR systems began re-routing local sites directly to places where they could see the returns. The outage did not impact local supervisors' ability to report their results directly to the Florida Department of State.
Initially, it was believed that a single county-level error caused the outage. VR Systems says there was no evidence of “malicious activity.”
