Internet outage affects Connecticut legislative meetings, governor’s office

tripped electrical breaker sparked a widespread internet outage affecting Connecticut state agencies and the legislature on Tuesday, forcing lawmakers to delay hearings and committee meetings while officials worked to resolve the issue.

Both the General Assembly’s website and CT-N, the network that streams legislative and other government proceedings, were either offline or bogged down by slow speeds for several hours on Tuesday, before the issue was resolved around 3 p.m. Staff in Gov. Ned Lamont’s office were also impacted by the outage, a spokeswoman said.

Neither the House nor the Senate had been scheduled to hold floor proceedings on Tuesday, their fist working day back from the Presidents’ Day holiday, though the outage forced at least five committees to delay or cancel their planned meetings, officials said.

After internet access was restored around 3 p.m., at least three of the affected committees — Housing, General Law and Insurance and Real Estate — resumed public hearings on more than dozen different bills, including what was was anticipated to be a lengthy discussion on rent stabilization proposals.

The legislature’s Children, Human Services and Banking committee meetings were all canceled. The meetings for committees on Energy and Technology, Aging and Appropriations were all rescheduled for Wednesday or a later date.

In an email to lawmakers and staff on Tuesday, the General Assembly’s ITS Technology and Support Manager Jay Aronne said that an issue with the state’s Bureau of Information and Technology Services — which provides internet access to the Capitol and other govA ernment agencies — was causing “periodic slowness” in the General Assembly’s Internet, remote networks and email connections.

“BITS is currently working to resolve the issue,” Aronne said in the email. “We will keep you updated as information becomes available.”

The Department of Administrative Services, which operates BITS, attributed the issue to a tripped electrical breaker at a state data center in Groton, which in turn caused an “unexpected widespread, ongoing outage,” according to DAS spokesman Jesse Imse.

“Anyone operating on the state network has been impacted by slow or impaired connection,” Imse said in an emailed statement around 2 p.m. About an hour later, Imse announced that the issue had been resolved.

The outage did not appear to impact the state’s Judicial Branch services on Tuesday, according to spokeswoman Rhonda Hebert.