BY JIMMY LAWTON
North Country This Week

St. Lawrence County schools were hit with a brief panic Monday morning as many Google programs stopped working worldwide, but fortunately the impact was minimal.

Some Google programs were interrupted just before 8 a.m., but the issue was resolved quickly and did not impact remote learning due to the time it occurred.

“It definitely was concerning especially in the online learning environment,” St. Lawrence-Lewis BOCES Director of Communications and Marketing Rebekah Mott said.

School districts throughout the country use Google Classrooms and Google Docs and their use has increased significantly since many students are learning from home amid the pandemic. Youtube and other Google owned services were also impacted by the outage.

Social media was rampant with concerns as users realized how dependent they’ve become on Google technology.

The outage reportedly impacted people’s ability to use Google devices such as smart speakers and thermostat controls.

According to a report from the BBC “Google said the problem hit its authentication system, which is used for logging in and similar functions, and lasted about 45 minutes.”

The BBC story can be read at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55299779 .