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Schools, Higher Ed Rocky Reopening with Zoom Crash on Monday
The new normal for instructional delivery amidst COVID-19 is the use of virtual learning in K-12 and higher education. The start of the new term for much of the education world experienced a rocky reopening as the popular Zoom conferencing platform crashed for users across the globe on the morning of Monday, August 24th.
Zoom was reported to have been down for five hours, during crucial times needed for educational activities at schools and colleges. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that Zoom outages were recorded around “7:40 a.m. ET Monday” and that “numbers of reported outages dropped from nearly 17,000 to less than 3,000 reports of Zoom outages.” Zoom usage has increased with the pandemic affecting many institutions, and users have climbed to 300 million worldwide. With widespread use of Zoom it was shocking to hear of a global crash of the platform that schools, educators, parents, and universities have planned daily instruction and meetings around.
Fortunately, by early Monday afternoon Zoom’s team had worked to fix the outage. Zoom tweeted from it’s account, “Everything should be working properly now! We are continuing to monitor the situation. Thank you for all of your patience and our sincere apologies for disrupting your day.”
