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Zoom Outage Impacted Online Classes

Zoom Outage Impacted Online Classes
8/25/2020
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Izzy Hall

On Monday, as many students were beginning their first week of online college classes, Zoom experienced a five-hour outage. The outage began in the East Coast at about 9 A.M. and lasted until just after 1 P.M. During that time, the outages spread further west across the country, including certain areas of the Midwest.

Zoom, a video conferencing app that has become widely used during the pandemic, is many institutions’ first choice for synchronous online college classes. When neither teachers nor students could log into Zoom meetings yesterday morning, many classes had to be postponed or cancelled. Power outages can happen at schools, especially in bad storms, so having to cancel class due to an outage isn’t unheard of. What is unfortunate about this particular outage is that for many college students it was their first day of the Fall 2020 semester – and for the incoming freshmen, their first college class ever.

While the Zoom outage was eventually fixed, the app’s downtime highlights the need to have a backup plan for remote learning, especially alternate meeting apps. Some college professors may have been successful in moving their classroom to another video conferencing platform like Google Meet or Microsoft Teams or a learning management system like Blackboard – although instructors at the University of Illinois at Chicago reported that Blackboard was experiencing technical difficulties at the same time as Zoom.

Were your online classes interrupted yesterday due to the Zoom app outage? How did your professors or teachers respond to the situation? Let us know how this outage affected you. And don’t forget to check in to your profile at Scholarships.com for all new scholarship opportunities that are coming due this fall. Don’t have an account? Try a free scholarship search today and get matched with personalized opportunities to earn free money for college.

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