WOODLAND — Woodland’s utility billing portal outage has entered its seventh day after servers belonging to the company that manages the small town’s utility payment system crashed last Friday.
Near the tail end of Monday’s city council meeting, City Administrator Peter Boyce told the seven-member council and Mayor Will Finn that the company that manages the city’s billing, Texas-based Minol USA, was experiencing a “major issue” with their servers, knocking out both phone lines and websites that Woodland residents use to make their payments since April 14.
“There is no indication at this point that personal data was breached,” Boyce said. Minol USA’s IT department and a consultant were brought on to help resolve the issue.
Boyce told The Daily News that he would meet with Minol USA representatives at 3 p.m. Wednesday for an update.
Currently, Minol USA is downloading statements from previous invoices, Boyce said. The network should be recovered and operating “early next week.” However, the auto-pay feature has been turned off, and the city will notify residents three to five days before turning it back on.
According to the city’s website, the billing phone line is back up and operating as of Tuesday, but the cause of the server issues remains unknown.
Residents are asked to visit Woodland City Hall if they plan to make utility payments in either cash or check while the utility billing portal remains out of order.
Boyce told The Daily News the city could accept payments only in cash and check, not credit or debit cards.
Minol USA has been an ongoing point of conversation as the city prepares to raise utility rates in May.
Amy Cohen, marketing director for Minol USA, said the company suffered a “network disruption,” impacting its systems.
“Upon discovery, Minol engaged third-party specialists to assist in investigating the source of this disruption, confirm its impact on our systems, and to securely restore full functionality to our systems as soon as possible,” Cohen said.
