On November 14th, Sheriff Jesse Slaughter announced that a test of the CodeRed system, originally scheduled for November 12th, had failed. It was discovered the weekend before that the CodeRed system was down.
As a result of this failure, the November test was canceled. Upon reaching out to OnSolve, it was confirmed that the system was indeed down. They did not provide an explanation for the outage, which remains unresolved and has not yet been restored.
“Cascade County has used the CodeRed system for over 10 years without any significant issues,” explained Sheriff Slaughter. “This almost now week-long outage has caused serious loss of confidence in the company’s product and reliability.”
On Thursday, November 13th, the Cascade County Commissioners and the Cascade County Attorney’s Office were consulted, and a letter was drafted to OnSolve formally canceling the new three-year contract set to begin on November 14th.
“I want to reassure the citizens of Cascade County that we do have a backup system for public notification, so if that incident occurs, we are fully capable of releasing that information,” stated Sheriff Slaughter. “In the coming weeks and months, Cascade County will be reviewing a new emergency notification platform, and we want to ensure that it is reliable and effective with external communication. External communications with the community is our top priority.”
Sheriff Slaughter concluded, “This outage reinforces the reason that we do these tests in our community. Also, if we are going to have a failure, we would prefer to have a failure during a test and not during a public emergency. This type of critical emergency notification system failing like this is completely unacceptable.”
Please continue to watch The Great Falls Gazette, as we will update when more information is available.
By Karen Anderson: November 14, 2025 – Great Falls, Mt
Author: Karen Anderson
Karen is the Editor-in-Chief overseeing all news operations at Foxys Publishing Co. She also loves photography and spending time with her dogs.
