On August 19th, 2025, just a week into the fall semester, there was an internet outage first thing on Tuesday morning. This internet outage affected all three College of the Sequoias campuses for the entire day. There were a lot of difficulties that students, staff, and workers faced throughout the day on campuses.

On Visalia’s campus there were many departments struggling without internet one of them being the Educational Support Services building. When talking with one of the student workers in the ESS building, Toby Shirk, he stated how, “The tracking system of signing in and signing out all works on the cloud so all that shut down. We ended up going old school using paper to have students sign in and out.” Shirk also explained that when it came to helping students without internet, they were able to use different resources such as textbooks and handouts that made it successful for them to get tutoring done.  

A lot of student support services require internet access and this outage was something that set many of these services back on Tuesday. One of the other student support services being the Giant Dream Center located at the Visalia campus.

Another student worker, Harley Weaver who works at the Dream Center was also deeply affected. Weaver explains she struggled without the internet not being able to work on her online classes. She stated, “As a student worker, none of our systems were working, so usually I send out text message reminders to come to their appointments on time. A lot of people didn’t show up and we couldn’t message the students not to show up since there’s not a lot we can do.” This was a major setback during the day for so many other students and student workers on campus had faced.  

The question is, should the school do something such as professors canceling classes for the day that require internet, or the campus being open if the internet is down on all three campuses? That is something we can consider if this were to happen again so students and also staff can get work done for the day and not end up falling behind.