AUGUSTA, Ga. (WJBF) – It was business as usual at the Richmond County Tax Commissioners office after being anything but. 

“The entire city experienced a system outage, so we weren’t able to serve the customers in the usual capacity,” said Jeffery Pooser Project Manager for the Tax Commissioner’s office.   

On Tuesday afternoon, the Tax Commissioner computers and all others across the city went down.  

Seth Durden drove from Metter, Georgia Tuesday to pay some timber taxes, but with the computers down, he had to drive back Thursday to finish his business. 

“It was a little aggravating, but we made it work and they were very helpful up here,” he said.  

The problem started during a test of the fire suppression system, it caused a power outage in the IT Department’s data center damaging two pieces of equipment, and getting that fixed took time.  

“Those parts are not locally found so those parts had to be sent here upon those parts having been sent here we also had a technician that had to come from Atlanta to actually install the parts so that’s what took the time,” said Information and Technology Director Tameka Allen.  

At the tax office with the system down, some people missed their birthday deadline to get their vehicles registered that is normally a cash penalty.  

“We’re going to do some back dating for our customers who came in yesterday so if we we’re able to serve you while our computers were down, they wouldn’t experience any penalty,” said Pooser.  

Tameka Allen has been in charge of Augusta I.T. for more than 20 years and says what happened is one for the books. 

“We’ve never experienced anything like this we will have an action review meeting with the team to see if there was anything that could be done differently,” said Allen 

The good news is the system is back but that also means paying taxes is back.