Updated with additional details from North Texas districts.
For the second time in a week, technology issues have impacted districts' abilities to deliver instruction to North Texas students.
At least four districts – Grand Prairie, Arlington, Carroll and Midlothian ISDs – confirmed they were impacted by a Zoom outage that occurred Monday.
Monday was Carroll ISD's first day back to school.
Grand Prairie ISD said the issues seemed to be mainly tied to logging onto the Zoom website. They encouraged teachers to use the Zoom app on their iPads – or the Zoom software on their computers – which seemed to be working.
Arlington ISD said it was impacted from about 8:30 to 10:30 a.m., and shifted students and teachers to Microsoft Teams.
Midlothian ISD said they received an email from Zoom around 7:45 a.m. Monday about the problems.
“We just said (to the teachers), just try to persevere and do the best you can. You can email your students directly if that seems to be a better way to communicate with them,” Midlothian ISD’s Karen Fitzgerald said.
But there is something positive that came out of Monday’s Zoom struggles.
“We discovered it through this outage, that we can make some improvements if we did some re-work with another vendor,” Fitzgerald said. “We were able to recognize that the challenge was really isolated more with our elementary kiddos more than anything because they use an iPad.”
Midlothian ISD started maintenance at 3 p.m. Monday to “improve your elementary student’s Zoom experience.”
“The challenges we’ve been facing, we can feel comfort in knowing that it’s not isolated to Midlothian ISD,” Fitzgerald said. “However, we do feel the pain and frustration that our parents are feeling.”
The outage, which was intermittent, affected users across the country.
In addition to schools, the Zoom issues also affected companies and businesses who have turned to the platform to host their meetings.
At the height of the pandemic shutdowns in April, Zoom reported they had 300 million users. In December, the company reported only 10 million.
Just before noon central time, Zoom posted that the issues should be resolved.
Last Thursday, a number of North Texas districts were impacted by network outages, including Allen, Richardson and Frisco. Midlothian was also affected by this outage.