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Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't universities and other organisations plan for outages like this and prepare an alternative to Zoom for precisely these sorts of occurrences?

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For many schools, zoom is the backup plan. Covid caused the in-person outage.

This isn't their area of expertise, and asking teachers to migrate to the backup and inform and assist their students to get online during an outage of unknown length isn't reasonable.

Snow days in 2020 will be replaced with Zoom Outage days.

If Zoom had an outage in early april, that would be legitimate. However it's been 5 months since schools first closed, and we've known for most of that time that this would be a long term issue. Do you really want the person who can't figure out two meeting programs over the course of several months to be responsible for your kid's education?

I made a joke about this earlier in the morning on my team's slack: "I wonder how many systems admins are going to wake up later this week and find Jitsi installations dotted throughout their infra" when the more tech-savvy users try to 'self-service' their video conferencing

Most institutions didn't even plan to go into Zoom, assuming they have some well-thought-out redundancy when they don't even have a well-thought-out primary is misunderstanding how disorganized most institutions are handling this whole situation: Most did nothing over summer to prep.

Sure. But everyone is already flying by the seat of their pants here. That there isn't a backup video conferencing system set up isn't overwhelmingly surprising to me.

(plus, training out of practise professors on two video conferencing systems? No way that would end well)

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