Tarrant Appraisal District’s new website crashes just one week after launch
Déjà vu for property owners?
The Tarrant Appraisal District’s website crashed again on Thursday.
It has since been brought back online.
The website crashed last week after a database failure, which prompted the appraisal district to launch its new website early.
One week later, that one crashed.
“The Tarrant Appraisal District experienced a network disruption. We have taken prompt action to secure the network, and we are working with leading independent cybersecurity experts to assist with our response and the restoration process,” the Tarrant Appraisal District told the Star-Telegram in a statement Thursday morning.
The statement also said that the appraisal district could not estimate when “full access” would be restored.
Chief appraiser Joe Don Bobbitt told the Star-Telegram in an interview Thursday afternoon that while the website is back online, phone and email services are limited and still down for the most part.
The appraisal district has called the incident a “network disruption.” When asked to elaborate, Bobbitt said he could not because the investigation is not complete.
He also did not rule out the possibility it could be connected to the crash that happened last week, calling it “suspicious.”
Last week Bobbitt told the Star-Telegram that out of an abundance of caution the appraisal district had hired a third party to investigate the potential breech of taxpayer information.
The agency’s website sustained a cyberattack in October 2022 but no taxpayer information was compromised, according to an investigation.
TAD launched a new website in April 2023, but it was quickly overwhelmed by traffic, with pages locking up, failing to download or timing out. It also did not include the protest function at first, forcing the agency to extend the protest deadline while it worked the bugs out.
The website’s functionality is critical during property tax season, because it allows the owners of the county’s nearly 680,000 residential and commercial properties to view their values and protest their values online.
Bobbitt, who started Feb. 1, said he is “fairly confident” the website will hold up during protest season this year but that the crash has hindered that slightly.
“If you’d asked me yesterday. Yes, I would have been really confident. I am a little less confident than I was yesterday. But, um, I’m still pretty confident that we’ll get back to where we need to, the staff are working diligently to fix these issues.”
The district sets property appraisals and administers exemptions for tax purposes.
This story was originally published March 21, 2024 at 11:01 AM.
