Online education has been thrown into disarray as a result of a widespread Zoom outage in Australia.
Zoom, the technology company, has replied after a massive outage in certain areas of Australia wreaked havoc on online classroom learning.
On Monday morning, online education was thrown into disarray when technology company Zoom suffered a global outage.
The number of reports to the outage tracking website Down Detector increased from around zero on Sunday evening to nearly 1200 by 9 a.m. on Monday.
The outage wreaked havoc on online education, with St Matthews Catholic School in Mudgee reporting extensive outages across all of its systems.
“Issues are now being explored and should be rectified shortly,” the school wrote on its Facebook page.
Tamworth's St Nicholas Primary School also reported similar difficulties.
“At 9 a.m. this morning, St Nicholas School was notified by CEnet of an outage affecting the Zoom service,” they added.
“We will keep you updated as additional information becomes available, but we ask that you refrain from contacting the school if you are having difficulty with this morning's class Zoom meetings.”
Gabi Zolezzi, a secondary school English teacher, reported that both Zoom and her emails were unavailable, while Jen Faulconbridge reported receiving faulty gateway and error messages.
Zoom Video Communications confirmed to NCA NewsWire that the issue affecting a portion of accounts in Australia has been addressed shortly after 11 a.m.
“We apologize profusely for the difficulty caused to these consumers. We propose that consumers subscribe to status.zoom.us to receive updates,” she stated.
The corporation made no mention of what caused the problem.
According to a spokesman for the NSW Department of Education, the outage was caused by Zoom difficulties and was unrelated to the department's systems.
“The Department is aware of a Zoom issue that began around 9 a.m. on Monday,” she explained.
“Some schools may have seen a brief outage of this service. The situation has been resolved. Zoom is not the major method through which schools deliver online learning, and so did not have a significant influence on a large number of students.”