Technical issues on the DeKalb County School District’s website could possibly handicap employees and residents seeking information from the school system for the next few days.
The outage started Dec. 7, and does not impact online learning, according to the school system.
The issue was caused by a “hardware failure” within the data center of the district’s web hosting vendor, who was not identified by district officials when asked by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. District officials have not attributed the issues to a cyberattack.
The vendor has estimated the issues will be resolved within 72 hours. Until then, the district has a temporary website that allows access to its online content and services.
The district’s website gives residents an opportunity to watch live and previously recorded board of education meetings. The site is also a resource for families seeking online registration for their students and public records requests.
But anyone who has tried to access the district’s website, dekalbschoolsga.org, since Monday morning gets an “error” page message. Some users have reported seeing a message saying “Your Connection Is Not Private,” which means the encryption service used to secure any data entered into the website is unavailable.
DeKalb schools acknowledged the snafu on Twitter, posting on Monday that it “is experiencing intermittent connectivity challenges with the district’s website due to a vendor-related issue. The Division of Information Technology is working with the vendor to correct this issue.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, visitors can access parts of the site using the browser web address betadcsd.org. Parts of the website, including video archives of previous board meetings, are still offline as of Tuesday.
Several residents on Facebook and Twitter reported the website’s issues on Monday morning when parents struggled to participate in or watch the public comment period of the school board meeting.
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