State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Virginia blames voter registration outage on fiber cut

StateScoop: An outage of Virginia’s online voter registration system and other government services that lasted for more than six hours Tuesday was the result of an inadvertent fiber cut near a government data facility, state officials said, occurring on the same day the state’s voter registration window for the Nov. 3 election closes.

The outage was reported about 9 a.m., as Virginians seeking to file or update their voter registrations flocked to the state Department of Elections’ website. The fiber cut, which occurred near the Commonwealth Enterprise Solutions Center in Chester, which opened in 2017, also knocked out several other government websites, including a COVID-19 portal and other sites operated by the state Department of Health.

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