State troopers in barracks across Maryland were left without access to central crime databases on Friday morning after a small fire in a generator room at Maryland State Police headquarters caused a power outage and knocked the data center offline.
Individual barracks did not lose power and retained access to their own computer systems, said Elena Russo, a police spokeswoman. The state police website was not accessible for several hours.
Power had been restored as of Friday afternoon.
The outage first occurred Friday morning during routine information-technology maintenance at the headquarters compound that had placed the data center computers on generator power, Russo said.
When the fire occurred, a sprinkler system turned on, the main generator stopped functioning and power was cut off, Russo said.
The data center computers are housed in a separate building from the generators, and were not damaged, she said. No foul play was expected, either, she said.
"We weren't hacked," she said.
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