Internet issues disturb PPS students’ first day of online learning

Pittsburgh Public Schools students experienced internet connection issues on the district’s first day of virtual school Tuesday, but school officials said the problems were fixed by midday.

Teachers are conducting all classes online for at least the first two weeks of school. Two unrelated problems emerged as students tried to log in Tuesday, said Mark Stuckey, interim chief technology officer for the district.

The first involved the district’s two internal internet providers. When one gets overloaded with traffic, the other is supposed to switch on automatically, he said. That didn’t happen Tuesday morning, so the district’s technology team made the switch manually, he said.

This issue was causing a slow and unreliable connection to district-provided web resources, including Schoology, a learning management system, and Microsoft Teams, used for direct communications between teachers and families. These programs were not the source of the problem, Mr. Stuckey said, but the lack of bandwidth would have limited access to them.

That problem affected those using district- issued laptops and

tablets, which hit a bottleneck as their content filters were processed through the school servers. “For the first two hours, everyone would have experienced low connectivity or no connectivity,” Mr. Stuckey said. Those using their own devices would have had better connections, he said.

The second problem Tuesday morning was that the district website, which runs on a website management system provided by the educational technology company Blackboard, also went down.

Many students access links for their classes through the website. Those who had bookmarked the links and accessed them directly would have bypassed the problem on the website. Mr. Stuckey said Blackboard access was also restored.

That problem was unrelated to the first one and would have affected users of any device trying to access the site, Mr. Stuckey said.

Blackboard said in a company statement it “experienced a widespread service issue” Tuesday morning and the surge in traffic was greater than it anticipated, limiting access to some school websites. “Our support team responded immediately and added additional resources to the system,” it said. “The system was restored and has been working consistently since about 1: 15 p. m.”

Mr. Stuckey said by midday, Pittsburgh students should have been able to access their classes, and the district did spot checks with some students with earlier difficulties to confirm they had gained access. The district staff will be prepared to make manual adjustments Wednesday morning, he added.

Parents and others posted more than 300 comments below the announcement about the problems on the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Facebook page by late afternoon. Some urged patience, while many others expressed frustration with a range of problems.

Some parents cited problems with devices that had been provided by the district, saying they had to skip a work day to allow their child to use the parents’ computer, which was able to connect.

Others spoke of continual frustration trying to log in, causing anxiety for both children and parents.

In an unrelated matter, the North Allegheny School District reported a problem with a web- security filtering system provided by the company Securly, which affected connections both for in- school and remote learning. Spokeswoman Brandi Smith said the district’s technology staff was able to restore service in less than an hour and a half. School districts in multiple states reported such outages.

Securly said in a statement it is investigating the cause of the outage, but it apparently resulted from a spike in domain- name system requests. “Our engineering team completely redesigned the DNS architecture to absorb the massive amount of traffic,” and service was restored by around 11 a. m. Eastern