It is the first day of lectures at Soton and Panopto has already crashed

Today is the first day of teaching for the academic year, and this afternoon Panopto already wasn’t working. University of Southampton students logged into Blackboard to attend their virtual lectures, only to find the Record Sessions folders were unavailable.

The site which lecturers had filmed their sessions on and which student would use to view the content, Panopto, crashed in the morning just as students would be attempting to access their lecturers.

Students were sent to a page that read the error message “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” revealing that their lecturers were not accessible. It was revealed by the Service Line, via their Twitter account, that the issue was Europe-wide and that throughout the time the site was down lectures were unable to recorded or viewed.

Shortly after this message was released, it appeared the issues had been resolved and the site was back up and running. However, some students are still having problems with Panopto.

It was a disappointing start to the year for many students and staff, but at least we still get two free face coverings each…

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