The Milwaukee County Jail's computer system crashed Wednesday morning. There was a possibility for a long-term outage, but the issue was fixed Thursday night.

The outage impacted all bookings and releases, which were being done manually. Jail staff needed to check individually on each release with MPD, the DA’s Office and run a CCAP criminal history to determine if the inmate has any holds, new charges or warrants which would prevent their release. Holds from agencies outside of the system could not be tracked.

The Milwaukee County Jail books approximately 100 inmates a day and releases about that same number.

In addition to the outage impacting bookings and releases, it also restricted phone communication between any manually booked inmates with their families, and inmate accounts which allow them to purchase commissary. Victim notification upon release of an inmate was also disconnected.