District-wide internet outage leads to testing delays for Orange County students
ORLANDO, Fla. — State testing came to a halt Wednesday across Orange County after an internet outage across the district.
Students and teachers are now figuring out when to re-schedule those exams before school lets out for summer.
Jack Hayes, an Orange County Public Schools Super Scholar Award recipient with a Presidential Scholarship to Florida State University, was in the middle of testing when the outage happened.
“I have nine individual exams for eight classes,” Hayes shared.
On Wednesday, Hayes was preparing to take two AP exams.
He says the first ended smoothly at around 11:20 a.m. with the second set to start at noon. But just as he was ready to check-in for the exam, his class ran into some trouble.
“I was one of around nine or nine-ish people that could sign in, in the room of like 20,” explained Hayes. “And then we heard that it was a district-wide issue with signing in.”
That district-wide issue was due to an internet outage in the middle of the day.
School officials said that the system came back online after 30 minutes and that they were still determining how many students were impacted.
While brief, Hayes says the outage delayed his exam by more than an hour and a half. The delay worried some of his classmates who had prior engagements.
“Obviously, a lot of people were really worried about this, especially people with jobs,” Hayes said. “Like everybody was concerned and were like, ‘I have to get to my job because I told them I would come in at this time and if this test is pushed back, then I really can’t make it.’”
Hayes says their teacher did give students an option to make up the exam if they couldn’t stay, but he stayed and took the exam.
While he’s glad the district resolved the issue quickly, Hayes says he’s adjusting how he prepares for these exams moving forward.
“I always am going to allocate like an hour around everything I have to do for AP exams and if I go until 4:30, cool okay,” said Hayes.
That 4:30 p.m. end time seemed to be the deciding factor for Hayes’ classmates.
He says that out of the 20 students in the class, seven stayed to take the exam Wednesday, while the others chose to make it up in the coming weeks.
