On April 18, an Internet outage hit Alton Community Unit School District 11. Teachers arrived at school surprised by the circumstances. The outage affected 5,800 students and 401 teachers.

Teachers couldn’t grade their students’ assignments or access their lesson plans on Google Drive. 

Students couldn’t access online assignments or their grades. The outage gave many students a day off from their classes. However, some teachers replaced their online assignments with hard copies. 

“Secretaries couldn’t access their files and books couldn’t be checked out in the library,” Assistant Principal Naj Citrowske said. “The cafeteria couldn’t scan IDs for lunches and the clinic couldn’t access medical information for students visiting.  Luckily the clinic keeps paper copies of all of their information, so they were able to retrieve it, it just took longer.”

“I have some lessons on my computer that don’t require internet,” social studies teacher Jesse Macias said. “We did some book work and did group work. I was alive before the Internet was invented so I’m not as reliant on it.”

Director of Technology Chris Roberts said that the core network services team informed the Technology Department that the Internet was inaccessible to their equipment. With investigation, the department discovered improper routing from the core network services through the firewall and out to the Internet.

Technology discovered that a Super-micro 813m-3 was preventing traffic from flowing. “We have finished reconfiguring it today and will be testing this evening,” Roberts said. “We are hopeful it will once again allow for traffic to flow seamlessly.”

“During our troubleshooting process, we attempted to replace network cables and adapters to rule out any potential problems, but our efforts were unsuccessful and the issue persisted,” Roberts  said. “We eventually determined that the equipment itself was the source of the problem, and we proceeded to create a bypass to enable traffic to flow freely between the core network services and the firewall. Effectively restoring Internet access.”

Roberts said he plans for the technology team to restore technology’s faulty equipment after school hours when students and staff have left for the day. Technology is figuring out a solution to prevent this from happening again.