E-learning provider D2L faces outage as Ontario students log on for remote learning

Two people use D2L software in this promotional photo. (@D2L / Twitter)

KITCHENER — Waterloo, Ont.-based e-learning provider D2L was hit with an outage on its website on Friday.

The outage of the company's learning platform, Brightspace, comes as thousands of students across Ontario access remote learning for the first time this school year.

Dozens of people took to Twitter to complain about the issue, which screen shots from the platform describe as "planned maintenance."

"Just a 'Planned Maintenance'... in the middle of the school day... that effectively shuts down my entire class both in-school and online..." said Twitter user Mr. Poirier.

In an email to CTV Kitchener, CEO John Baker said that the maintenance was not scheduled, and that the company would try to clarify its notice page in the future.

"We had sudden and unexpected spike in demand on our storage platform that impacted a small number of our clients. We have addressed the core issue, some clients are back online and others are coming back online shortly," he said.

The Twitter account for Limestone District School Board in Kingston tweeted about the outage at around 11 a.m., identifying the Minds Online program as the one being affected.

The school board said that it will affect all of its secondary students.

"This issue is affecting multiple Boards across the province. No ETA for restoration at this time," the school board said in a tweet.

By 1:27 p.m., Limestone District School Board said that Minds Online was back up and running.

In a response to a question about the issue, D2L said it's working diligently to help its IT team fix the outage.

Such a disruption is uncharacteristic of the company. In a social media post from July of this year, D2L said that it had an up-time of 99.99 per cent, even during its recent spike in demand as students learn remotely around the world.

Officials did not say how many clients were affected or for how long.

This is a developing story. Check back for more details.