In late May of 2017, almost every school in Western New York was affected by disconnection of the internet. Mr. Tim Cox, Assistant Superintendent of Instructional Support Services for the Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES, provided information regarding the internet outage.  Nearly every school in Western New York obtains internet access from Erie 1 BOCES in West Seneca, New York. Board of Cooperative Educational Services provides instructional and non-instructional services to schools. The network outage was a result of the servers performing as they should to ensure that all data is secure, the equipment is protected from viruses, and that all of the users are “digitally safe.” A distributed denial-of-service attack, in which the bandwidth of a web server system is flooded with requests, occurred, but the servers were able to protect all data.  However, the internet was working very intermittently for three days while the attack was dealt with.  The source of this attack was identified and information has been shared with the FBI and NY State Ed, according to WKBW Buffalo News.  Mr. Cox stated that “we have all become very reliant on internet connectivity to perform many work and school tasks.  Please know that behind the scenes there are a large number of professionals working everyday to make sure our work and learning goes uninterrupted.  Thankfully, our schools are provided with internet access that is safe and very reliable for tens of thousands of people on a daily basis.”  According to Barbara Mocarski, Executive Director of Educational Supports and WNYRIC Services, there will be upgrades to the system for next year.