Contributed by Jenn Ray, Learning Technology Administrator I
Most services that are cloud-based will have a status page that is available to users. As most of you are probably aware, we experienced a Blackboard outage on Thursday November 4, 2021. Because our instance of Blackboard is cloud-based (SaaS – Software as a Service), we are at the mercy of Blackboard, Inc. themselves to resolve issues such as these. With Blackboard, and any other vendor where an outage is possible, as soon as we discover the problem we do reach out to them to ensure that the problem isn’t specific to our instance. The Blackboard issue this time was a systems outage with Blackboard’s US Eastern Datacenter. Although we reached out to Blackboard, we were also able to check Blackboard’s Status site (https://status.blackboard.com/) for issues.
Blackboard is not the only cloud-based service we use with a Status site. Echo360 and Zoom also have status sites. If you are experiencing an issue with Blackboard, Echo360, or Zoom but you haven’t received a notification from the Support Center about any outages yet, definitely contact us (SupportCenter@uhcl.edu) to let us know so that we can troubleshoot and reach out to the vendor if necessary, but you can also check the status page for that service to see if there is something going on we haven’t caught yet.
Blackboard: https://status.blackboard.com/
Echo360: https://status.echo360.com/
Zoom: https://status.zoom.us/