CASCADE COUNTY — Cascade County is officially terminating its contract with CodeRED, the county’s emergency alert notification system, after an outage took the platform offline and raised concerns about security, reliability, and communication from the system’s provider, OnSolve LLC.
The county announced the decision on Thursday, citing state statute 28-2-1711, MCA, which allows the immediate rescission of a contract when one party is unable to provide the services agreed upon. A three-year contract was scheduled to begin on November 14, 2025.
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The CodeRED system failure was first detected early in the morning on November 10, when the Great Falls Police Department found they could not access the platform. The county had been preparing for a county-wide test alert scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on November 12, and had launched a public awareness effort urging residents to update or confirm their contact information ahead of the test.
However, residents attempting to sign up or log in quickly discovered the system wasn’t working. Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter said those early attempts by the public helped reveal the problem.
According to a news release, OnSolve did not notify Cascade County that it had suspended CodeRED access. Instead, county staff learned from customer support that the system was offline after reaching out themselves.
OnSolve publicly acknowledged a problem with the platform on November 11th, nearly a day after the county discovered the outage. The company said CodeRED had been taken offline due to “potential security vulnerabilities.”
Cascade County has used CodeRED for more than a decade without major issues. But the week-long outage, lack of communication, and unresolved system suspension prompted county leadership to formally cancel the new three-year contract that was set to go into effect on November 14.
OnSolve offered the county “temporary” access to its new Crisis24 platform as a workaround. However, county officials rejected that option, saying it was inadequate and inappropriate for public safety use at this time.
Slaughter noted that Crisis24 would require re-importing all existing emergency contact data, a process that would delay notifications and introduce new uncertainties. Officials also emphasized that the platform has not been vetted or approved by the county as a reliable emergency alert system.
Sheriff Slaughter assured residents that the county has a backup emergency alert system in place and remains fully capable of issuing public safety notifications through alternative channels if needed.
“This type of critical emergency notification system failing like this is completely unacceptable,” Slaughter said. “If we’re going to have a failure, we’d rather it happen during a test, not during a real public emergency.”
In the coming weeks and months, Cascade County will evaluate new emergency notification platforms for both public alerts and internal emergency call-outs. Officials say reliability, communication transparency, and system security will be top priorities.
