Update to original story, 10/29/25: As of 3:53 pm Central Time, the Department of Education website has returned online. However, neither the agency’s social media accounts nor its spokespeople have issued an explanation of the outage.
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The official website of the U.S. Department of Education went offline on Wednesday morning, leaving users unable to access federal education information.
The Dallas Express detected the outage around 11:50 a.m. Dallas time on October 29. The department’s homepage, www.ed.gov, had shown “no response” for more than three hours, according to the website monitoring platform IsItDownRightNow.com. “Www.ed.gov is DOWN for everyone. It is not just you. The server is not responding,” the monitoring website’s interface said.
DX reached out to the Department of Education for comment, but a spokesman did not respond.
At the time of publication, no major federal student aid deadlines appeared to coincide with the outage. The Medical University of South Carolina’s financial aid catalog showed regular FAFSA submission dates and loan-related deadlines stretching into early 2026, with no notable activity listed for October 29.
It was unclear whether the outage was related to routine maintenance, a cyberattack, or a technical error. The Department of Education has not released a statement on Facebook or X.
Other federal departments, including the Department of War, continued to have functioning websites as of Wednesday afternoon.
The Department of Education’s online services are widely used by millions of students and families to complete financial aid forms, access loan information, and manage federal student loan repayment. Some websites related to the Department of Education, such as StudentAid.gov, remained online, although their links back to the Department of Education website did not work.
The outage follows recent large-scale service disruptions impacting Amazon Web Services earlier this month, which temporarily interfered with several major platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat, and Coinbase, The Dallas Express reported.