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Remote students will never know the joy of waiting by the TV on a snowy morning to hear that.
the school has been canceled. Its equivalent? A 502 error message from Google.
Yesterday morning, Google experienced an “authentication system outage” that removed Google Classroom, Gmail, YouTube, and their suite of workplace collaboration tools.
School exit
With up to 74% of schools operating virtually in states like New York, Google’s educational technology platform, Google Classroom, has become ubiquitous. Users of the online portal doubled in April and reached 100 million in June.
Yesterday’s outage only lasted from 6:47 a.m. to 7:32 a.m. ET, but the forty-five minute window was enough to wreak havoc on the millions of students and teachers who rely on Google Classroom and Google Meet.
- Some high schools managed just two hours late, but others (like schools in Westland, Michigan) gave their roughly 9,800 students the day off.
“As a parent of two virtual high school students, the timeline of the reaction to the disruption: jubilation, then despair when @YouTube didn’t work, plus sadness when Google’s classroom went back to work” wrote one of the parents on Twitter.
It’s Google’s world, we just live in it
As students cheered, Monday morning briefly fell into chaos for the millions who worked from home.
Gadgets integrated with the Google Assistant went crazy. A Nest Hub owner was unable to control his smart heater according to The Verge and some Google Home users spent the entire morning in the dark.
- Even Google employees couldn’t access their emails – BBC reported that a representative said they couldn’t comment because they couldn’t access Gmail.
But Google’s supposed monopoly is bigger than Covid-19 or the remote work boom. And as long as school and work remain virtual, the world will always depend on its IT technicians.
Food to go: Based on Google’s own precedent, nothing will change anytime soon. On Monday, CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back the date of return to Google’s office until September 2021 and proposed “flexible” internal requirements when they return.
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