ARLINGTON, Va. — Arlington Public Schools is reporting technology and connectivity issues with their distance learning platform Tuesday morning.
"APS is aware that students are currently experiencing system and connectivity issues. We are working to resolve these issues as soon as possible," the school district said in a tweet.
Frank Bellavia, spokesperson for APS, said there is a firewall issue preventing students from logging in to Teams. As of Tuesday afternoon, Bellavia said the issues have been resolved.
Superintendent Dr. Francisco Durán issued the following statement to parents and the community regarding the outage:
"We sincerely apologize for the system-wide technical challenges many families experienced today, especially with connecting APS devices to Canvas and Microsoft Teams. The Department of Information Services identified that the primary source of the issue was firewall-related, due to the large volume of traffic trying to access Microsoft Teams at one time. We are deploying a solution now.
We knew there would be a high volume of traffic on the first day of school. We believed we had taken all necessary steps to prepare for this in advance, and unfortunately this morning we discovered an additional adjustment was needed. We are refreshing the firewall servers now. Performance has already improved and should continue to improve through the afternoon. We will continue to monitor this tomorrow and throughout this first week to make adjustments when necessary.
There are no additional steps necessary for families. We encourage you to continue trying to log on and to try restarting your child’s device.
Additionally, the phone number we had set up for technology support was quickly overwhelmed due to the same issue, and we have resolved that issue. Families can continue to access our self-help guides on the website and dial 703-228-2570 for additional support. We are sorry for the issues and understand your frustration as we start the year.
I also want to clarify that we were aware of an issue with Global Protect, brought to our attention late last week, and that issue was resolved over the weekend. We will continue to monitor and support families throughout this week and on an ongoing basis."
Like many schools in the DMV area, all-virtual learning is taking place this fall due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In July, Arlington Public Schools voted to start the 2020-2021 school year on September 8 during a meeting on July 16 and are implementing an all-virtual instruction option for students.
While the school system offered families a hybrid option with two days of in-person learning or all-virtual, Arlington Public Schools superintendent made an operational decision to begin the school year through all-virtual learning for the safety of students and staff, the school system told WUSA9.
"Throughout our planning, the health and safety of our staff and students has been our top priority, and beginning the year with a virtual model allows us to continue to monitor the situation until we are confident it is safe to return..." said Dr. Francisco Durán, Arlington Public Schools Superintendent in a statement released on July 14.
Teachers and staff returned for the academic year on August 24.
The school system plans to continue to monitor health data in September in hopes of transitioning to in-person learning as early October, Dr. Durán said. They hope to have hybrid in-person learning by the second quarter.