Update 12:30 p.m. Feb. 8: Technical problems that disrupted the production of Lee Enterprises newspapers in Virginia and elsewhere this week were due to a “cybersecurity event,” according to a story published Saturday in multiple newspapers.
Lee Enterprises CEO Kevin Mowbray said the company is “focused on determining what information — if any — may have been affected by the situation,” according to the story, which appeared in The (Lynchburg) News & Advance and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, among other papers that the company owns.
Mowbray said the company had notified law enforcement but could not speculate on details because the incident is under investigation.
Mowbray did not say when the problem would be fixed, according to the newspaper story.
The technical issues delayed the delivery of some editions and forced some newspapers to produce smaller editions with fewer features.
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Earlier: Lee Enterprises, which owns newspapers in Virginia and two dozen other states, experienced technical problems that prevented Tuesday’s print and digital editions from being available in some markets.
Nearly all of the homepages of the company’s 70-plus news websites displayed a message on Tuesday that said “system delays” were temporarily affecting delivery of printed newspapers and access to the company’s E-Editions, which are online replicas of the printed papers.
Further messages variously described the problem as “a production issue,” “a server outage” and “companywide technology issues.”
In Virginia, Lee owns newspapers in Bristol, Culpeper, Charlottesville, Danville, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Martinsville, Roanoke, Richmond and Waynesboro.
Most of them explicitly stated on their websites or on social media that they were unable to produce a printed newspaper for Tuesday.
Not all Lee newspapers publish a printed edition daily. In 2023, the Bristol, Culpeper, Charlottesville, Danville, Martinsville and Waynesboro papers joined about three dozen others in reducing their schedules to print only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. But on days when all of the Virginia papers produce a printed edition, they total more than 50,000 copies combined, according to circulation figures published last year.
Customers also could not sign up for subscriptions or access their accounts online on Tuesday, according to a separate website message that said those services were “temporarily unavailable due to maintenance.”
“We are working to fix the issues,” the company said via its homepages.
Many Lee websites carried partial versions of their usual E-Editions, offering pages of puzzles, comics and advertisements but not the front page or inside pages of local news. Many of the company’s newsrooms posted collections of their local stories on their home pages with links to them on social media.
Lee Enterprises did not respond to a request for additional details.