Google Classroom was down and out, giving students an excuse to avoid turning in their homework

Thanks to the pandemic (if you can thank it for anything, it’s only ironically), many schools have been utilizing Google Classroom to help connect and educate their students and even more schools have begun to adopt it for the first time. Despite its popularity and how incredibly useful it is, that doesn’t mean it’s immune to outages. In fact, it’s my guess that this is the very reason it went down.

As you can see using Google’s status dashboard, the service dropped like a sack of potatoes around 10:00 PM EST, and remained down for nearly forty-five minutes! Luckily, the company provided periodic updates during that time regarding their investigation to help teachers and students plan around it while it persisted.

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More importantly, at around 10:45 PM EST when the service was back up and running, Google reiterated that the service’s reliability remains a top priority for them and that they will continue to make improvements to prevent outages in the future. They actually got things ticking again 15 minutes before they promised another update, so the team was working tirelessly to resolve things.

It’s interesting to think about how technology like Google Classroom will affect our lifestyles and even educational workflows. If you’re a teacher, what was your solution for helping your students navigate this and get their assignments in on time? Do you have a policy in place as a safeguard against this type of circumstance? As we rely more and more on digital tools, I believe that educators will need to begin thinking about implementing fail safes, but I also think that Classroom has been incredibly reliable thus far and Google is always quick and communicative while fixing things.