People who had been expecting to catch the Auburn City Council study session online Feb. 8 were disappointed.

That’s because the city’s website was down, and without it, the city could not guarantee people would be able to access the link and log on to the virtual meeting.

According to the city, CivicLive, a company based in Colorado that provides website service to many government agencies and schools across the nation, suffered a “significant hardware failure” last week.

In addition to Auburn, Burien, Renton and Newcastle were among other cities whose websites went down last week and have stayed down since.

According to Auburn’s Communications Manager Kalyn Brady, the problem only affects the city’s website, so residents are still able to file police reports with the city’s emergency redirect page.

“They have indicated to us that they have had some sort of significant hardware failure,” Brady said. “To be clear, all pages and information on the city’s site are backed up, and while this does prevent the site from loading, no data has been lost.”

Brady said CivicLive’s estimate on the restoration of services is still unknown, but in the interim, the city has enabled its emergency services message, which redirects the site to essential contact information and access to the city’s resident reporting tool.

“While not perfect, this does provide customers with resources to continue to connect with the city. It does allow for residents to continue to use all functions such as pay a bill, file a police report, etc.,” Brady said.

“We will also be following up with the company after this incident to discuss how we might put additional measures into place to provide even more robust, alternative options for residents should this ever happen again,” Brady said.