Here's why Appleton and Green Bay school district websites were down most of Monday

Websites for both the Appleton Area School District and Green Bay Area Public Schools were down for much of Monday.

Both websites were back up and running by 4 p.m. after being down for almost 15 hours.

According to a Facebook post late Monday morning, the Appleton district was notified of an outage early in the morning by its website provider, Intrado. The outage was caused by a structural fire near a data center in Toronto, Canada.

In the latest update to the post, Appleton schools said the websites are accessible again. If someone still gets an error message, they can try to refresh the page.

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Just before 3 p.m., Green Bay schools posted on Facebook saying it was aware of a "service interruption affecting" the district website.

The fire in Canada caused the disruption to Green Bay's website, too, said Lori Blakeslee, director of communications for the district. She told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that winter storms were impeding efforts to fix the outage.

The district was notified that the website was down just before 1:30 a.m., Blakeslee said.

In an update to the Facebook post, the district wrote: "The service interruption has been resolved, and website service has been restored. Thank you for your patience.

Reach AnnMarie Hilton at ahilton@gannett.com or 920-370-8045. Follow her on Twitter at @hilton_annmarie.

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Toronto fire causes Appleton, Green Bay school websites to go down