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Google Glitch Took Thousands of Chromebooks Offline (geekwire.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the no-internet-for-you dept.

Slashdot reader Bismillah was the first to notice stories about Chromebooks going offline. GeekWire reports: Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of Google Chromebooks, widely prized by schools due to their low cost and ease of configuration, were reported to be offline for several hours on Tuesday. The apparent cause? A seemingly botched WiFi policy update pushed out by Google that caused many Chromebooks to forget their approved network connection, leaving students disconnected.
Google eventually issued a new network policy without the glitch -- but not everyone was satisfied. The Director of Technology at one school district complains Google waited three and a half hours before publicly acknowledging the problem -- adding that "manually joining a WiFi network on 10,000+ Chromebooks is a nightmare."

4 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. You get what you paid for by DogDude · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You get a cheap gadget created a a giant corporation used for collecting and re-selling information about the "users" and expect to use that as a PC. What'd you expect?

    --
    I don't respond to AC's.
    1. Re:You get what you paid for by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ... and expect to use that as a PC.

      Schools do NOT expect to use Chromebooks as PCs. They use them as thin clients, running everything in a browser. The kids can't mess them up, because, well, there is nothing on them.

      The schools know what they want, and Chromebooks deliver it. Nobody is being deceived.

  2. The dark side of the cloud you can't control by zerofoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We were impacted by this glitch. We are a small school, so manually connecting 40 or so chromebooks was not a huge deal.

    However, this is not the first time we have been impacted by a Google screwup. We've had outages where Google's authentication service failed and no one could login to their chromebooks.

    We've since decided that we are walking back Chromebooks for staff members and putting them back on Windows laptops. Between the functional limitations of a chromebook, and the centralized parts we can't control, we've decided that an entirely cloud strategy for students and teachers is too risky.

    Admin and teachers will be provisioned on on-prem systems. Students will be cloud provisioned. At least this way when Google's infrastructure shits the bed, the business side of the school can keep going.

  3. No School Today! by Fly+Swatter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ..because the vendor pushed out an untested update again. Now we are teaching children to accept being dependent on a single point of tech failure. Good old pen and paper is still better, your brain retains the info better too.

    -Time to seed my lawn, get off.