SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Newly detailed county records show Spartanburg County fired its IT director on June 10, the same morning a major network outage began after officials flagged questionable activity on county systems.
According to her termination letter, Jessica Gilliland failed to implement security measures after earlier breaches. Deputy county administrator Earl Alexander wrote that industry standard practices had not been implemented, citing gaps after an August 2025 cybersecurity breach that included database backups, SentinelOne deployment and multi-factor authentication, and the loss of the 2025 Coroner database.
Hours after the June 10 firing meeting, the county isolated networks and later described the episode as questionable activity, the third such incident in four years. Officials called in the State Law Enforcement Division. SLED later said it was no longer involved.
In a June statement during the outage, the county said that on June 10 it took the immediate precaution of isolating and protecting its networks after identifying questionable activity on its computer infrastructure, making many services unavailable while security checks continued.
By June 30, officials said core network services had been restored and that they had not identified evidence that data was accessed, exfiltrated or compromised. Gilliland was later replaced by Tony Bryant, who previously worked at the state treasurer office, and county council in September approved four new IT security and project positions he requested.
