At approximately 5:30 p.m. Monday night, students started to notice that Google Chat, a communication program that is used by about every high school student in the district, became unusable for all high school students in the Wentzville School District. Students trying to use Google Chat were met with an error screen saying the organization has canceled their Google Workspace subscription.
This sudden outage created multiple alarms for teachers as well, specifically the teachers who are advisers of clubs. StuCo and Publications are just two of the many clubs that this had affected across the district since the entire staff uses google chat. Publications adviser Jonathan Hall uses Google Chat for communication for the entire program and was nervous for it to be down.
“We use it as our primary means for communication within all of our staffs and it was a brief scare as students emailed me last night,” Hall said.
This outage was a surprise to everyone, however, even though it happened last night, most staff didn’t find out until just this morning, and some had no clue at all it was out.
WSD tech worker Kurt Unger found out this morning that Google Chat was out when a student came into his room showing his computer screen saying Google Chat was disabled. While this was a big deal that this program was out, Unger had no worries that it was just a simple mistake.
“In the elementary and middle school, Google Chat is disabled, so I think they probably made some change there and left high school in there as well, but I don’t think that was intentional,” Unger said.
No one really knows the true reason for the outage, but we do know that it was a mistake. In the district’s technology department, there are servers for Google Chat for that are split into many different categories, for high school, middle school, and elementary school.
Principal Dr. Ed Nelson wasn’t even aware of the Google Chat outage this morning.
“No, honestly I had not heard about that. We’ve had so many technology issues this year, you can’t even keep track of them,” Nelson said. “Our technology has been so messy, WIFI has gone down, Apple TVs, I suspect this has nothing to do with them making a new rule. They’re just having a hard time keeping up with all that work consistently on a regular basis.”
While the outage was sudden and big deal, the problem has been restored meaning that it was just a mistake made and not a permanent policy made by the district.
