ORLANDO, Fla. — According to the Florida Department of Health, the state vital statistics system is down following a potential cyber incident.

As a result, funeral home owners say the outage has caused issues and backups for facilities across the state.

Due to the outage, funeral homes currently have to fill out death certificate forms with a pen and paper, which is delaying families from getting a death certificate quickly.

At Stafford & Simon Family Funeral Home, which opened in Orlando about a year ago, brothers Ortavia Simon and Terrance Stafford say they are doing what they can to handle the situation. 

“What we’re doing right now, we’re filling out the electronic death certificate," Stafford said. "So, this is usually what we would be doing online, but now we’re doing it by hand."

While filling out the form manually gets the job done, it slows down the process significantly, he said.

“Depending on the cause of death or whatever the doctor certifies, will determine if the medical examiner will place this on hold, if they’re going to give us an approval for cremation or burial,” Stafford said. 

He said the outage is likely to result in long hours of work for this team. 

“This all has to be hand delivered to the doctor," Stafford said. "They have to sign it. So, depending on the doctor, whenever their schedule is, it can depend on the timeframe that you get this back."

Stafford said his staff is prepared to work in this way for quite a while. 

In the meantime, his message for families is to be patient.

“Bear with us," Stafford said. "Unfortunately, there is no timeframe that we can give you. But know that people are working diligently in order to ensure that you can get the death certificates so you can handle all the matters of business that occurred during the loss."

Stafford said burials and cremations could potentially slow down during this time. 

Spectrum News reached out to the Florida Department of Health for an update on the outage, but did not immediately receive a response.