To Packback’s students and instructors who were unable to access their discussion communities on Sunday evening, we would like to apologize for the major inconvenience caused by a brief sitewide outage.
Although Packback uses a scalable server system, our capacity planning was based on prior weeks’ usage and historical data and thus we were unprepared for this week’s major increase in web traffic. We planned for the unexpected load of more students being online due to COVID-19, but from last week to this week we saw an unprecedented uptick in traffic all starting around 10:50 PM CST that exceeded our conservative estimates.
Our priority is first and foremost to support our students and instructors who have trusted Packback with their courses. We are now in the process of making the appropriate adjustments to scale up immediately. We are increasing server capacity to support an extremely high traffic scenario around our most common deadlines. As always, our engineering team will continue to be on-call, and if any interruptions to service occur they are online immediately- day or night, weeknight, or weekend- to remediate the issue.
If you are a student who was unable to post and missed a Sunday at 11:59 PM deadline, please reach out to help@packback.co and we will help you make any necessary arrangements.
If you are an instructor looking for support in accommodating late work from your students, please reach out directly to your Experience Manager or experiencemanagers@packback.co for assistance in making adjustments to your grade book.