Chicago city computers hit by power outage - Chicago News and Weather | FOX 32 News

A power failure brought the city's entire computer system to a halt for about two hours Thursday — causing headaches for everyone from residents attempting to purchase city stickers to city employees trying to access their emails.

City Clerk Susana Mendoza's aides said they didn't expect their site's operations to resume normal activity until Friday.

"Unfortunately, the entire city system is down and in the clerk's office that means we can't offer the city stickers right now," Kristine Williams, a spokeswoman for City Clerk Susana Mendoza, said at about 3:30 p.m.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the system went down shortly after 2 p.m., but was back on line before 4 p.m. The outage also affected the internal Internet connection, including email and shared files.

"It was an operations issue. It was an issue with the battery, the power system that resulted in systems going down. There was a problem with the power system that resulted in the system going down for a short period of time," said Sarah Hamilton, the mayor's communications director.

She said she was "positive" the problem had nothing to do with hacking.