NoaNet works to restore service to residents and public agencies
A network outage in Washington state earlier this week derailed student standardized testing, crippled municipal election and filing systems, and disrupted commuters who rely on ferries to get where they’re going.
According to local reports, the outage started around 3 a.m. on Tuesday. The responsible operator, NoaNet, told a local NBC affiliate that the outage was caused by “a broadcast storm.”
Based in Olympia, Wash., the Secretary of State’s Office kept up with the outage on Twitter.
From a May 12 tweet: “An outage at our digital archives is affecting all of our election web applications, incl [sic] online candidate filing, voter reg[istration], etc.”
Then, once service was restored: “Yay! We’re back up, accepting online candidate filings, voter reg, etc.”
NBC reported that the outage hit 70 schools trying to conduct a standardized test for around 18,000 students.
A spokesman for the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction wasn’t aware what caused the outage.
“Could it have been deliberate? We don’t know at this point,” he said. “We’d be very interested in why it happened. Why it happened could tell us how we can stop it from happening again.”
The state’s transportation department reported that employees lost Internet connection and couldn’t access DOT cameras positioned to provide traffic monitoring.
Another public service affected was the online reservation tool used to book ferry passage between the mainland and the San Juan Islands.
NoaNet, short for Northwest Open Access Network, is a nonprofit mutual corporation that provides wholesale telecom transport in Washington.
The company is based in Tacoma, Wash., and has been offering high-speed broadband – including in rural areas of the state – for 15 years; the company operates some 2,000 miles of fiber optic cable.
