(WTAJ) — A widespread Zoom outage isn’t the way most universities planned to start the year, but that’s the hand they were dealt Monday morning as virtual classes kicked off.
This outage didn’t just affect one area, it was all over the country, mainly the East Coast.
The outage prevented video meetings and webinars.
“As we began to troubleshoot and started watching our social media feed, it became clear pretty quickly that there were a lot of other people who were experiencing the issue,” Juniata College’s CIO Anne Wood said.
When Juniata College got word about the problem, the IT staff suggested professors switch to Microsoft Teams, another platform that can be used to have class.
“It’s hard to kind of transition and switch right in the middle of either getting ready to start a class or teach a class,” Wood said.
Wood initially saw a post about the zoom issues from a Penn State faculty member, with some of their classes being cancelled.
“My roommate, has a zoom outage. She can’t get into her classes…I was okay, but my roommate had problems and I felt so bad,” PSU Sophomore Taylor Kuscyk said.
And that uncertainty is lingering for many students and teachers.
“Well hopefully it’s fixed by tomorrow because I only had one zoom class today and three tomorrow and there all back to back to back so hopefully that gets remedied by tomorrow,” PSU Junior Colton Pleslusky said.
WTAJ reached out to zoom to get some answers about how many were affected and what caused the outage, but didn’t receive any specifics.
Wood thinks a possible cause was the sudden influx of users as many schools started classes on Monday, but issues like this are just part of technology.
“It’s always been built into the understanding that you have backup plans in place and that things don’t always go as planned and kinda getting back to that point about being flexible and learning as we go,” she said.
The company said the issue was fixed early Monday afternoon.
With some schools depending on this technology, many are hoping these hiccups are minimal.
