City Briefly Loses Internet Capabilities Wednesday

After an outage of approximately five hours, Yorkville officials regained access to the Internet Wednesday afternoon.

For most of Jan. 2 city departments had no access to email or the Internet, except through the use of smart phones. But by about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, staff members regained access to the Internet as emails began to flow, including police media reports.

The source of the problem could only be described as an apparent “glitch” in a piece of networking equipment. City administrator Bart Olson called the problem a “random occurrence with a piece of network equipment.” Olson said the restarted the piece of equipment several times without success, then it “randomly started working.” 

No word yet on whether city officials will replace the equipment or if the IT consultant believes the glitch will occur again.

The Internet issue was discovered Wednesday morning when city employees returned to work after the Jan. 1 holiday, Olson said. Olson announced the outage through the United City of Yorkville Facebook page. He said staff had access to that page as well as the city’s Twitter feed through smart phones.

“People can always reach us through dialing the telephone too,” Olson said prior to the restoration of Internet access.