(Updated at 10 p.m.) Arlington County’s website has been down for most of the day and remains down as of Tuesday night.
The county is working to fix the technical difficulties, which brought down the website completely. The homepage was working this morning, while many interior pages were bringing up error messages, before the entire site went down.
Those hoping to participate in today’s County Board meeting, which starts at 3 p.m., should be able to do so on YouTube or on local cable TV. Those hoping to speak at the meeting are being asked to call 703-228-3130 to register to do so.
A county spokeswoman said that there are no signs, at least so far, that the outages are the result of hacking.
“We are actively investigating the current technical issues related to the County website,” said Shannon Whalen McDaniel. “At this time, it is too early to offer a conclusive statement about the root cause of the issues, however we do not see any overt signs of malicious activity. We will provide an update as soon as it is available and appreciate the public’s patience at this time.”
The county previously posted a page on the site explaining the technical difficulties. That page is now inaccessible. Later Tuesday, the county homepage was replaced by a static page, explaining the outage and providing links to online services that were still available, like the library website, the service request page and the county payments portal.
Shortly after 3 p.m., Arlington Public Schools also announced to families that it was having tech troubles.
“APS is experiencing an internet outage that is affecting applications and services, such as MyAccess, on the APS platform,” APS said. “We are working with our vendor to address the issue and will let families know when it has been resolved. Thank you for your patience.”
Despite the problems, the main Arlington Public Schools homepage was still operable. Later Tuesday evening, APS said that the disruption was caused by “a major fiber [optic line] cut in Vienna.”
Our ISP notified us of a major fiber cut in Vienna causing a service disruption for APS. The vendor is working to restore service, but there is no estimate for restoration. An update will be provided in the a.m. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
— Arlington Public Schools (@APSVirginia) October 21, 2020