BARDSTOWN, Ky. (WDRB) -- Hacked heading into a holiday weekend.

The digital network went down in the Bourbon Capital of the World on Friday. Thousands of people across Bardstown lost internet access, crippling servers at city and county agencies.

Around 8 p.m. Friday night, Bardstown Connect's Facebook page posted an update that crews had implemented a fix that should restore service to subscribers.

When WDRB asked the city's mayor what caused the hack, he did not answer.

As a result of the outage, Nelson County Sheriff Ramon Pinerora says they quickly switched to AT&T hotspots. They also started relaying calls through a State Police post. He says the department will continue to answer any calls from the county.

"So we would ask the public to understand what's going on here locally, that now we're gonna have to go outside of our dispatch to get information back to us, and relay to the officers, or deputies, or EMS, whatever the case may be," Sheriff Pineiroa said.

Thousands of homes were impacted too, along with many of the town's small shops.

"A lot of the stores we went to did not have internet access, so we had to pay cash for a lot of things," Jill Taylor, visiting from Owensboro, said.

David Erickson's Blind Boar Shanty is a men's shop with higher-end clothes and customized items, along with liquor. Those are things you usually don't buy with cash.

"A guy was coming in and he was buying a whole outfit, shoes, pants, everything. You were looking at $500 for an outfit, and he couldn't buy it," Erickson said.

Between the shop and his bourbon store, he estimates the outage cost him $5,000. He says the total haul on Friday at the shop was a little more than $100.

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