By Mary Claire Molloy – Special to the Bloomingtonian
The video conferencing tool Zoom crashed for some IU students and faculty on the first day of classes.
University Information Technology Services said in an update that system administrators are investigating “a global outage by the vendor” that has barred some users from accessing Zoom through IU’s portal. All nine of Indiana University’s campuses are listed as experiencing problems.
IU Bloomington said the outage only pertains to web login access and encouraged students to use the Zoom app on PC or mobile to access their classes.
Zoom listed partial outages for meetings and video webinars on their US website this morning. Since then, they have tweeted that the issues were resolved. The outages came as students around the country are beginning remote classes during the coronavirus pandemic. Canvas, a learning platform that gives IU students access to online assignments, files and class announcements is also reportedly down.
Madison Kitto, a senior at IU Bloomington, tried to log onto her African cinema and politics class at 9:25 this morning.
“For the first 45 minutes I had no idea if it was my stuff that wasn’t working or if it was happening to more people,” she said.
Kitto eventually accessed the class using her phone.
Some students came into the class 45 minutes late, she said, while others weren’t able to log on at all.
“We had to pay more this year to accommodate the new virtual learning, which was disappointing on the first day and the first class,” Kitto said.
