Election officials in Virginia are blaming a severed fiber optic cable for taking down its voter registration website on the final day that residents are allowed to register to vote before next month's election.

The event is the second major voter registration site outage in recent weeks and the latest in a long line of election infrastructure outages during critical periods before major elections. Earlier this month, Florida's online voter registration system crashed for several hours due to unprecedented demand. In 2018, Georgia's site shut down days before the registration deadline.

"This morning, the Department of Elections was alerted by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency that a fiber cut near Rt. 10 in Chester near the Commonwealth Enterprise Solutions Center was impacting data circuits and virtual private network connectivity for multiple Commonwealth agencies," a spokesperson for Virginia's Department of Elections said in an email.