A county-wide WiFi outage occurred at 10:30 am June 11 for approximately 10 minutes. The outage was due to a power source failure of a key piece of equipment, MCPS Chief Technology Officer Pete Cevenini said in an email sent to MCPS administrators.

Reasons for WiFi outages in MCPS range from small hardware issues to complete system failures and hacks like the one last September, IT specialist Oriole Saah said.

“This outage was a small one and probably only needed a reboot of the system,” Saah said.

Although the outage was short and MCPS’ network team resolved quickly, some students struggled to finish and turn in their work.

“In my psych class, an assignment was due and it was going fine,” junior McAlister Forbes said. “Then the WiFi cut out when people were finishing the survey and starting the quiz, so I know a lot of people were having a lot of trouble.”

The issues will hopefully be resolved by next year, Cevenini said.

“There have been too many outages,” Cevenini said. “We are upgrading equipment this summer as well as adding key pieces of equipment that should prevent many of the issues that happened this year.”