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The shutdown, blamed on a cyber incident, occurred March 7 at Unit 2 of the Hatch nuclear power plant near Baxley after a Southern Company engineer installed a software update on the plant's business network, the Washington Post said Friday.

The computer in question, monitoring chemical and diagnostic data from one of the facility's primary control systems, was designed to synchronize data and the reboot after the update sent out the wrong message.

The report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the reboot reset the data on the control system, causing safety systems to misinterpret the lack of data as a drop in water reservoirs that cool the plant's radioactive nuclear fuel rods. As a result, the plant was forced to shut down,

Southern Company spokeswoman Carrie Phillips said the emergency systems performed as designed, and that at no time did the malfunction endanger security or safety.

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