State Network Internet Outage Impacts State Capitol

The Connecticut State Capitol was one of many state buildings impacted by a widespread internet outage Tuesday.

The Department of Administrative Services got service back up just before 3 p.m., but state lawmakers say it impacted their work in the legislative session as meetings were canceled throughout the day.

In the middle of a busy session, the Capitol and Legislative Office Building were quiet as people went home early.

“It's made today a little bit more challenging in terms of legislating,” Sen. Matt Lesser (D-Middletown) said.

Announcements indicated public hearings were delayed or as people tried to connect to spotty internet.

“We can't connect at all, there's nothing to connect to. We can't get our emails, we can't get online, we can't look at testimony,” Rep. Bill Buckbee (R-67^th District of New Milford) said.

The Department of Administrative Services (DAS) released a statement on the incident.

“This morning a tripped electrical breaker at one of the state’s data centers has caused an unexpected and widespread on-going outage. Anyone operating on the state network has been impacted by slow or impaired connection. A cross-functional team under DAS’s Bureau of Information Technology Solutions (BITS) is working to diagnose and address the issue, and the estimated recovery window is between now and 3pm. We apologize for the adverse and unexpected impact this issue has caused.”

“We're supposed to have public hearings all day and the internet went down this morning. It really put the whole place on its heels,” Buckbee said.

Buckbee was chairing the canceled Energy and Technology Committee hearing. The committee was set to hear public comment on 14 bills.

“There were 65 people scheduled to give testimony today,” Buckbee said. “Unfortunately, those people have to wait until tomorrow to be able to give their testimony. It becomes a huge delay right now, because we have our committee meeting on Thursday. And in that committee meeting, we have to respond to the bills are being brought for the public today.”

Lesser was also chairing a Human Services Committee public hearing that got canceled. He says it had to be postponed because of post-COVID regulations that now require public hearings to be hybrid.

“Our rules actually don't allow fully in-person committee business,” Lesser said. “So all of our hearings have to be streamed online, we have people who are signed up to testify online. And when the internet goes down, we can't hear from people.

The DAS points out that their BITS team got service back up and running the same day that the outage started, and that since many state employees can work remotely, a number of services were still offered throughout the day.

“It turns out that what happened was that we had some old equipment, this was an internal data center switch that they broke,” Art House, a UConn adjunct professor who has worked in intelligence and cybersecurity issues, said. “You got some old equipment, you're constantly looking for what's old, what's overburdened. What has been around for too long.”

House, who is the state’s former chief cyber security risk officer and former chairman of PURA, says this was simply a case of old equipment, but also offers an opportunity to prepare for more serious situations.

“We in Connecticut, we need a cybersecurity strategy,” House said. “It needs active collaboration, and we need to plan for and rehearse what would happen if we had a cyber attack.”