CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — If you have tried to visit the Nueces County website on Wednesday, nuecesco.com, you likely encountered an error message.
That's because at midnight Wednesday morning, that domain expired and the site was purchased by another party.
The county was caught off guard and this caused mass confusion throughout the Nueces County Courthouse.
Nueces County Judge Connie Scott has apologized for the inconvenience and said she doesn't know who is at fault or how this lapse happened.
“It was purchased, I'm told 10 years ago. I thought it was up for automatic renewal. I don’t know why the renewal changed, if maybe a credit card or something changed. You know how that is,” she said.
All online services for the county are down for the time being.
Fortunately for the county, they had slowly been in the process in moving to a new website domain, nuecescountytx.gov. Scott said she thought the county had one more year on the domain and all that time to prepare the new website.
This means county employees will have a new email address. 75% of employees had already gotten their new email address up and running.
“Say their name was John.Doe, then @nuecescountytx.gov is their email address now, instead of the former one,” Scott said.
If you have any business to take care of with the county or you’ve submitted paperwork online in the last couple of days, such as an application or appointment, Scott is asking that you contact that department to ensure they received your information.
"There’s probably, unfortunately, going to be a little transition period that we may loose some things in the process. But, we want to make sure everyone that has sent us something that we have the opportunity to respond and we reach out,” Scott said.
Scott added that she's asked all departments to send out a mass email from the new address to those on their email lists. You should not disregard it as spam, she said.
County business will continue on while the website is down and you can still head to the county courthouse to take care of any problems you have, during business hours.
"I'm told it was going to be high priority to get it back up and running. And, there will be a notice on it (the website) as well for people to contact and the change in the email addresses of anyone you've had (been in contact with) before," Scott said.
There is no time frame on when the new website will be up and running.
This is a developing story. KRIS 6 News will have more information for you as it becomes available.
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