SALISBURY — Rowan-Salisbury Schools had an internet blackout Friday after a hang-up with its internet service provider.

Superintendent Lynn Moody said AT&T, which supplies internet to the district, reported that a cable was down near Harrisburg.

“We’ve pretty much been down all day,” Moody said.

Moody said the outage brought some whimsy — and a bit of frustration — to those in the school system.

“(A teacher) sent me a text — the kids were saying we didn’t pay our bill,” she chuckled.

While some might expect learning in a technology-based district to grind to a halt without an internet connection, Moody said that was not the case Friday.

“We consider ourselves to be blended learning, so we don’t just use the internet to teach school with. … It’s probably more of an inconvenience than anything else. Math teachers will still teach math; science teachers will still teach science.”

If blended learning is applied properly, teachers should be teaching most of the day without devices or an internet connection being a necessary part of a lesson.

“We still have books,” Moody pointed out.

She compared the outage to a power outage at a retail store. If the electronic cash register goes down, business continues and cashiers count out change manually.

“It’s just simply a tool,” Moody said.

AT&T was unable to give the district an expected repair time. Andrew Smith and Candace Hosey, RSS employees who monitor the connection and the district’s technology, were both out of town.