-Messenger photo by Chad Thompson Cars fill the parking lot of the Fort Dodge Community School District Central Office on a recent day. The district cancelled school for today after the district suffered a cyber attack Wednesday morning.

School is canceled today in the Fort Dodge Community School District after a cyber attack compromised school phone and internet services Wednesday.

The district started experiencing an outage of the utilities in buildings early Wednesday morning when a cyber attack locked down its servers, according to Jennifer Lane, director of communications and community relations for the district. The district is working with authorities to resolve the situation.

“We’re hoping to get it resolved quickly,” Lane said on Wednesday, “but we didn’t think it would be resolved fast enough for classes tomorrow (Thursday).”

Students participating in in-person instruction are excused for today as school officials hope to get the problem resolved by Friday.

Since staff rely on internet access to facilitate online learning, students will not be expected to participate in online learning, either.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the district said ”Dodger Families — today the district experienced a cyber attack that locked down our servers and took out phone and internet services in our buildings.

“We are currently working with authorities to restore our systems. Due to these issues and for the safety of our students and staff we will not have school tomorrow, Thursday, Sept. 10. Students will not be expected to participate in online learning since our staff do not have internet access in the buildings. Also due to the cyber attack, we are not able to send messages through Infinite Campus so you will not receive an automated call regarding tomorrow’s school closure. Again, there will not be school tomorrow.”

Jeremy Pearson, the district’s supervisor of information technology, was still working from his office late Wednesday night.

He said the district is working with a security incident service to try and “slowly bring up some services a little bit at a time to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Pearson said the issues of the attack were noted a little after 6 a.m.

“We started working as soon as we got into the office with the security company we are working with to maintain some of our compromised systems,” Pearson said.

“It appears to be some ransomware attack for payment to allow us to recover our systems,” he said. “We are slowly, but tediously restoring systems a little bit at a time.”

Ransomware is a type of malware that threatens to publish the victim’s data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid.

Pearson could not offer an estimated time of full restoration.

State and federal cyber crime units continue to investigate.