City council president says Atlanta is open for business despite cyberattack

"Well, we just had a meeting and had all the staff on hand and we are working on some contingencies," said Moore.

She said most city employees have been advised not to use their desktop computers, and they're preparing to record their committee meeting minutes next week on paper.

That will be the plan for the foreseeable future.

"It could be weeks, it could be months, so we're not hoping for a long period of time, but we do know it's not going to be easy resolve," said Moore.

The city is currently experiencing outages on various internal and external applications, including some that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information.

"This is deathly serious," said Atlanta city councilman Julian Bond. "If they had gotten greater access to our system, to the police, or the airport, these folks could have done horrendous damage."

City officials have said they are confident that their team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon.

"We're limited on the number of resources we have as a city so we have to make sure that we're making this a priority every year in the budget, making sure we're getting all of the latest technology to protect ourselves," said Bond.

Meanwhile, the hackers have issued a ransom to restore all systems. They're demanding payment in Bitcoins equivalent to about $50,000.

"Paying the ransom doesn't necessarily get you back to pre-ransom day," said Moore.