Updated at 4:56 p.m.
Vermont state government websites were restored Friday morning after a 19-hour interruption caused by a cable break in the Washington, D.C., area, according to Shawn Nailor, the state’s secretary of digital services.
“Our websites are a critical means by which we communicate with the public,” Nailor said. “So it was a very impactful outage and a very obvious one. If you went to anybody from the (Department of) Fish and Wildlife to the governor’s office, you had no response.”
The websites went down at about 3 p.m. Thursday, Nailor said, and came back online Friday at 10:30 a.m.
Power was cut to multiple internet service provider lines provided by AT&T into a primary data center for Tyler Technologies, Nailor said. Tyler provides website hosting for the state of Vermont. Its spokesperson, Karen Shields, confirmed the account.
AT&T spokesperson Lesley Merritt said in a written statement that the cable had been damaged by boring. Merritt did not elaborate.
Nailor said some services were affected, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles’ DMV Express, where people can renew a registration or a license online. Email was not affected, Nailor said, because that is run by Microsoft.
According to Nailor, many other states had been affected by the outage, though Shields declined to comment on the impact on other clients.
Nailor said it had been an anxious two days. “I was up in the middle of the night seeing if the sites were coming back, seeing if there was an update,” he said.
“We’re definitely going to put together a plan of action for how we remediate this so this event does not ever occur to the state of Vermont again,” Nailor said.”We will use this to improve services to Vermonters moving forward.”
