Support News

Blackboard Collaborate - Intermittent Service Interruption Resulting From Weekend Server Migration **RESOLVED** Plus Message from Blackboard

Posted: 2014-01-06 12:56:23   Expiration: 2014-01-13 18:56:23

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2014-01-06 12:56:23. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

Some users may have trouble logging into meetings or connecting to archived recordings, archived recordings could have interrupted or truncated playback and the telephony service has been intermittently unavailable.

Blackboard Support indicates that most of these problem were resolved Wednesday January 9th but there are some residual issues.  


Please advise your users to join meetings early, so that they have time to resolve any problems that arise.  

If there are issues connecting with meetings that are about to begin or meetings in progress for either moderators or users the fastest way to get assistance is to contact Blackboard support directly toll free via phone at  1 (877) 382-2293.  

On January 9th Blackboard sent a communication to customers the most pertinent part we are sharing with you.  

Excerpted text from letter to customers from Blackboard Senior Vice President Mark Strassman:

"Blackboard customers and partners, 

[…]

I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that over the past few days many of you have been experiencing slowness in our Web conferencing service. I speak for our entire organization when I apologize for any frustration you have felt. 

Maintenance was performed in conjunction with bringing up our new North America datacenter resulting in an impact to your service. While intermittent service interruptions are typical of major system conversions, rest assured that through this implementation, we will be even better positioned to provide you with the high-quality service you deserve and to drive greater improvements over the long-term. 

The system is currently stable and accommodating peak traffic loads.  The complete investigation of the situation is ongoing and I will continue to openly share information as needed on the root cause and additional safeguards we are putting into place to ensure this does not happen again.  Our team is working diligently to monitor and test the system in order to quickly detect and respond to anything new that might be discovered or reported. 

[…]

I want to assure you that we are fully dedicated to providing you with a Web conferencing service that you can rely on and a responsive customer support experience to address any issues that you or your end users encounter. We recently restructured our organization to centralize all Blackboard products and technical services into a single unit to help us anticipate and respond to your needs more effectively and improve our cloud delivery. Our new and improved datacenter is part of this update. It has an infrastructure that is designed specifically to support student and institutional success and we are excited to provide you with an enhanced cloud environment.

We take our responsibility to facilitate the best education experience possible very seriously and I thank you for your patience. Thank you.

[…]

Mark Strassman

Senior Vice President, Product and Industry Management, Blackboard"
Thank you for your patience.

-- Collaborate: Service Team