Resort Municipality of Whistler continues to work towards restoring services

Publication Date: May 11, 2021

Publication Date:  May 11, 2021

Most services will remain unavailable for the next two weeks, continued patience of community is appreciated

The Resort Municipality of Whistler’s (RMOW) email and network systems remain temporarily offline due to a cyber security incident reported April 28.  As a result, many municipal services continue to be unavailable or have limited access. An estimate for when all services will return to normal is not yet known, but a limited number of critical systems are expected to start to return within two weeks.

“We apologize for this inconvenience to our community members and greatly appreciate everyone’s patience as we work diligently to bring these services back online,” said RMOW Chief Administrative Officer Virginia Cullen. “The safety and security of the RMOW’s systems is our highest priority to protect the information that we maintain for our employees and community members. It is a painstaking and lengthy process to make sure that our systems are fully secured before we bring them back online.  We are working with cyber security experts to further strengthen our security safeguards in the ever-evolving cyber security landscape.”

Once RMOW systems are back online, RMOW will continue to work through applications and requests in the order that they have been received. Alternate methods to provide services have been put in place where possible.

In-person service at Municipal Hall also continues to be temporarily suspended but all departments can be reached. Information and contact details for specific departments and services is provided on a temporary website at whistler.ca. To provide customer service and answer questions, a call centre is available at 604-932-5535 from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday to Friday.

A special meeting of Council will be held at 3 p.m. on May 11, 2021. The link and agenda for that meeting are available at www.whistler.ca The next Regular Meeting of Council, Closed Council and Committee of the Whole meetings will be held May 18, 2021.

Infrastructure such as water and sewer, and emergency systems such as 911 and the Whistler Fire Department are secure and continue to operate as normal. The Whistler Public Library and Meadow Park Sports Centre as well as municipal parks remain open with COVID-19 safety protocols in place.

The RMOW continues to work with RCMP, cyber security experts and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for B.C. in responding to the cyber security incident. At this point in time, the investigation has not found evidence that public information has been compromised. If it is determined that personal information of members of the public has been compromised, the RMOW will reach out to those affected individuals. The RMOW is reminding the public that it does not contact individuals by phone or email to request personal information. Additionally, the RMOW advises community members to continue to exercise a high level of awareness about protecting their sensitive personal information and to practice good password hygiene such as regularly changing passwords to all online accounts and not re-using the same password for multiple accounts.