The platform is already an integral part of the country’s educational infrastructure
By:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
25 August 2020 (Mykonos, Greece) – The de facto communication tool of pandemic life experienced widespread outages in the U.S. yesterday morning, disrupting remote learning sessions as students across the country logged on to start the new academic year. For roughly two-and-a-half hours Monday morning, many users were unable to load the Zoom website; others could neither host nor join scheduled meetings. Zoom fixed the problem by 11:30 a.m. ET, the company reported on its status page.
The timing was less than ideal, since many schools across the U.S. were just starting online instruction after a summer surge in the coronavirus pandemic scotched many plans to reopen classes with students present in the flesh. The outages spanned both coasts and even some spots overseas. The Atlanta public school system, Penn State, Howard University, and many more institutions were hit.
With great bandwidth comes great responsibility
What was once an enterprise communications platform is now being tasked with helping teach America’s youth. While there are no official figures around how many schools are using Zoom this fall, yesterday’s disruption shows the platform is already an integral part of the country’s educational infrastructure. At the college level, a Morning Brew survey showed 64% of students said their schools are implementing a hybrid model of both in-person and online learning this fall. 32% are going fully remote.
Bottom line: Zoom was up and running by noon yesterday, but with more schools still to open and competitors galore, the pressure is on to perform. Facebook, Microsoft, Zoom and others have launched campaigns across almost every U.S. public school administration and university to get their business.
