Access Washington Website Dealing With Outages

Washington state's website -- Access Washington -- has had intermittent outages all week, according to The Olympian. And despite the Department of Enterprise Services (DES), which runs the state’s agency websites, saying on Friday afternoon that repairs are done and the outages should be over, some visits to the portal were still unsuccessful.

State IT officials are unsure of what's causing the outages, but two possible causes, or a combination of these causes, were suspected – the sole server the portal uses (so there is no backup should it go down), or a feed used by agencies to update their information posts on the portal. 

“We worked with Consolidated Technology Services and we completed work installing a monitor that is going to switch traffic to an alternative server should one fail for Access Washington," DES spokesman Curt Hart told The Olympian. "We also installed an application that should prevent the problem with the feed that was occurring."