Today, a district-wide internet outage that began at around 9:35 a.m. and is still ongoing disrupted teaching at Amador. 

“It’s horrible,” said AP Computer Science and Cybersecurity teacher Richard Hanson. “Most of what I do with my cyber kids and AP kids relies on the internet for going and retrieving information. Our current project is sharing work, so it makes it very, very difficult.”

The county of Alameda provides internet to PUSD through AT&T. Connections inside Pleasanton are working, as well as Amador’s network on campus and to the district, but Amador’s connection to Alameda is broken.

“Maybe somebody cut a wire, maybe somebody misconfigured something, but I think if something’s misconfigured, they would have fixed it by now, so I’m thinking it’s physical damage, in my opinion,” said Hanson.

In J4, computers that usually avoid Wi-Fi issues couldn’t escape this outage. Students couldn’t even log in to the computers directly wired to the network.

“In a media arts class, it creates a lot of headaches for our class trying to find alternate activities in a class that’s literally based on using computers,” said video production, digital arts and journalism teacher Wendy Connelly. 

Classes directly related to technology struggled, but so did many others. Students and teachers could not access any webpages or use the new Smart Projectors that rely on WiFi, as the default Chromebook network, guest, and teacher Wi-Fi networks were down.

“Some of my classes depend on internet usage almost every single day, and I found that in those classes we had extra time because the teachers couldn’t use their technology to teach,” said Joanna Chu (‘23). “In some classes the internet outage affected the agenda for the day, and in others it didn’t.”

Still, Amador has come a long way. WiFi issues used to be more frequent, even occurring once a week.

“We always had to use our hotspots to download lessons so we could still teach, and I definitely learned then that it’s important to keep some backup articles or other printed handouts ready for students to work on,” said Connelly. “For students, this was a hard day.”

As of 5 PM, Amador is working with AT&T to resolve the ongoing issue.