The statewide system for virtual schools, Canvas, is down for the second time in the first three days of the new school year.

The first day of the 2020-2021 school year for most public schools in North Carolina was Monday, Aug. 17. Students and teachers that attempted to log on to the statewide system were met with an error message.

Wednesday, Aug. 19 reportedly had much the same start, with the notable exception that Guilford County Schools on Monday had a message on its homepage explaining that the system was down. Wednesday there was no such message on the GCS homepage.

However on the GCS Facebook page this message was posted at 10:04 a.m.:

“GCS has just learned that access to the Canvas learning platform through the NC Ed Cloud portal is unavailable across the state right now. We apologize for the inconvenience. We will let you know when the state has the system back up and running. Thank you for your patience.”

On Facebook, people expressed their frustration and offered advice.

Jennifer Waldrop Smith posted, “It wouldn’t keep crashing if they weren’t making everyone log in at the same times. Frustrating. It’s these dang live classes.”

William BJ Levettee II posted, “When you don’t invest in technology on a county and state level this is what happens. State of NC better call T Mobile and get some of that 5G.”

Lynn Poole posted, “We got on, he did the work and went to submit it and it said it cant be submitted right now try again. He cleared it and he had to do the work again. I told him not to do it a third time.”

Several people posted that they logged in early and hadn’t been kicked out, but others that they had been logged in and did get kicked out, so it appears it is a hit or miss kind of thing.

The Guilford County Board of Education decided to not have any in-person classes for at least the first nine weeks of the school year, so all the classes until Oct. 20 are remote, or are remote when the system works.