Update at 7:45 p.m. — The county website is back up, though some users who accessed the site while it was down may still have their visits redirected to the temporary page, for now.
Earlier: Bad news: More than 24 hours later, Arlington County’s website is still down as of Wednesday afternoon. Good news: the county’s voting information pages and payment portal are among the things currently up.
As of 3 p.m. the county website was still reduced to a temporary, static page with a few links. That’s despite Arlington Public Schools recently announcing that its tech troubles, caused by a fiber optic line cut, had been resolved.
A county spokeswoman told ARLnow that the county was, in fact, also affected by the fiber cut, but it was not the reason for the website outage.
“Arlington County Government’s fiber was cut as well yesterday,” said Shannon Whalen McDaniel. “However, we are not experiencing a disruption due to a redundancy in our system.”
There is still no estimate as to when the county’s full website might be back online.
“We can’t provide an estimate at this time, but staff are working to resolve it as quickly as possible,” Whalen McDaniel said.
In addition to the CAPP payment portal, library website, service request page, real estate search and County Board meeting agendas, the Arlington voting and elections sub-site remains up. Whalen McDaniel said that is due to some good planning.
“Given the criticality of the voting site, we had a back-up site for it already in place for redundancy sake,” she said. “Yesterday, we simply expedited the move to this replacement site to ensure there would be no impact on voting information.”
The county’s last major update to its website was made at the end of 2013, when it switched to a more flexible WordPress-based system — the same underlying Content Management System as ARLnow and millions of other sites — for most pages.