On Tuesday, Jan. 14, the Westside Community Schools district internet crashed, leaving many students and teachers off of the grid. This crash caused dozens of issues throughout the high school but it was quickly dispatched by Westside’s tech support team. According to Head of Tech Support Michael Sanchez, the issues were caused by multiple hard drive crashes.

“The big issue [was] that three of [the hard drives] crashed,” Sanchez said.“[This caused] the whole [system] to fail and have to be rebuilt from scratch.”

In addition to the server crashing, Sanchez said there was another issue tech support ran into.

“We contacted our vendor, Dell, [and] they [said they] were going to get us our new drives overnight,” Sanchez said. “[However], their ordering system went down so it delayed it another night.”

Physics instructor Benjamin Powers said he had to drastically change his lesson plan because of the problems with the high school’s internet.

“We had to go a different direction with a lot of web-based activities that we do,” Powers said. “[Such as] different interactive things on the student laptops.”

Powers said that the science department was able to adjust the lessons and react.

“We just kinda switched up the plan to take it away from internet-based activities,” Powers said. “There might be a different version that is more old fashioned and on paper, [allowing for] collaboration and communication between students.”

Although these issues were difficult to overcome, Sanchez said that they are not likely to repeat themselves.

“Hopefully [they won’t happen again],” Sanchez said. “We just got seven new drives.”