This story is part of “Parenting in a Pandemic,” WTOP’s continuing coverage of how parents are dealing with child care, schooling and more through the coronavirus pandemic.
Distance learning for public schools in Arlington County, Virginia, will resume Thursday after it was canceled Wednesday because of a network outage.
The Northern Virginia school district tweeted that it had suffered a major network outage traced to a fiber cut, which occurred late Tuesday afternoon. Its internet provider was not able to restore service in time for the start of virtual classes Wednesday.
“We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused and again, thank you for your patience,” Arlington Public Schools tweeted.
Network Update: Connection Restored, Distance Learning to Resume, Thu, Oct. 22
We wanted to provide an update on network services. Yesterday, APS experienced a complete loss of internet service as well as the connection to our secondary data center in Ashburn.— Arlington Public Schools (@APSVirginia) October 21, 2020
Distance learning will resume for all students, tomorrow, Oct. 22.
If you have any technology issues, please visit https://t.co/iTE218pGb9.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your continued patience.
— Arlington Public Schools (@APSVirginia) October 21, 2020
Students did not have access to the online learning portal. Wednesday’s deadline for making Level 2 selections in ParentVUE for pre-K to fifth grade students was extended to Oct. 23.
Meal services were not affected.
In what appears to be an unrelated incident, Arlington County’s website was down since just before noon Tuesday. The county posted a temporary page with links to some services, and to its Facebook page.
The police department’s page was also inaccessible, but 911 service was not affected.
Students in the county started the semester with virtual learning due to the coronavirus pandemic.
WTOP’s Laura Spitalniak contributed to this report.
