A man approaches the Minnehaha County Treasurer’s Office in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Aug. 20, 2025, the second day on which a power outage shut down access to state records. (Photo by John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
The network outage that downed a host of South Dakota state government systems in August was caused by mislabeled wiring in a room full of routers at the Department of Transportation building in Pierre, lawmakers learned Thursday.
The mislabeling ultimately led to the torching of a critical, $80,000 network traffic controller switch and its backup. State computer systems, including those used by the courts, local registers of deeds, auditors and treasurers offices and, for a short time, the state radio system, were down for nearly two business days…