A Pennsylvania-based company that hosts funeral-home websites had its systems breached, causing online obituary outages for the two local mortuaries.
Black Cooper Sander Funeral Home and Grunnagle-Ament-Nelson Family Funeral Home & Crematory both have been affected by the system breach at Pittsburgh-based Expressions Tributes. The Pennsylvania company’s own website says it “specializes in funeral home website design and online obituaries.”
It’s unclear how many funeral homes were affected by the broader outage. Expressions Tributes could not be reached immediately for comment.
An employee at Grunnagle-Ament-Nelson said Expressions Tributes informed the funeral home by email that the system malfunction occurred at 9 p.m. Feb. 6, last Saturday, and that it was caused by a breach.
That funeral home has had its obituary services suspended, but still maintains a website presence otherwise. It had older platform technology, and funeral homes with the older tech were spared of a full-blown website malfunction.
Black-Cooper-Sander wasn’t as fortunate. Its website, including obituaries, remained entirely down as of Sunday morning.
Co-owner John Sander told the Free Lance on Friday the funeral home was having a website presence re-established for obituaries in the coming days. He hoped to have a new website up by month’s end.
