Zoom had a worldwide service outage, which impacted issues for Bakersfield College starting back to class early Monday morning with remote learning.
The outage had started early this morning, Aug. 24.
Zoom is an American communications technology company that provides video-telephony and online chat services and is often used for teleconferencing, telecommuting, distance education, and social relations since the global pandemic.
According to BC’s Dean of Academic Technology, Bill Mosley, BC caught the problem early and began communication before classes even started this morning, to make sure students and faculty were able to make adjustments.
“Virtually all of our morning classes were affected in some way,” he said.
In the meanwhile, Mosley suggests students use Canvas to keep in touch with their instructors, and to see what they are asked to do in place of their live Zoom class.
BC’s Todd Coston, director of Information Technology is happy with the Zoom product and explained that outages like this are very uncommon. He also does not anticipate this problem happening again anytime soon.
“Just remember we are in unprecedented times. All of the online learning platforms and tools are experiencing loads they have never seen before due to so many schools and organizations going online for the Fall portion of their academic year,” Coston said. “Most of the platforms have responded quickly and efficiently to disruptions and outages and overall there has been pretty minimal impact on learning. For BC, we will continue to monitor the various tools and communicate to our staff and students to keep them updated on outages, changes, and improvements to each of these tools.”
Zoom started an investigation at 05:51 PDT when they received reports of users unable to visit the Zoom website. Soon after Zoom updated they have identified the issue and are working to fix the issue and some service has been restored for some users but are “continuing to roll this out to complete the fix for any users still impacted,” the company said on their website. Users were also unable to sign up for paid accounts, upgrade, or manage their service on the Zoom website.
At 10:10 PDT the company updated they have resolved the issue causing some users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars.
If BC students experience any further issues with zoom, they can contact BC’s Academic Technology team.