Zoom was down this morning and it couldn't have hit at a much worse time for many schools trying to reopen amidst the pandemic. Like many businesses, schools now rely upon an array of technology solutions to conduct school. When those platforms and services go down, it throws everyone for a loop, particularly when there's no backup plan.

These problems are well known to people who have worked from home. While Zoom is quite reliable, every service suffers from occasional outages, including services intended to keep sites up and running. It's an inevitable part of technology. While it's possible to have backup plans in place, or quickly find an alternative, the shift to a new platform isn't seamless.

This morning, my son's school changed over to Google Meets to start the day instead of Zoom. After two days of getting everything up and running with Zoom last week, this week kicked off on a new platform. Most of first grades made the transition decently, though the platform is much different. There was no way to see all faces on the ipad, nearly every student had a frozen video at some point, and there was more lag.

It's worthwhile to have options, and it's difficult to expect seamless transitions. Zoom still leads video conferencing by a mile and the outage today furthered proved how important it's become.