Berlin's online school platforms crash again

Berlin-Across Berlin, teachers and school kids had trouble accessing the city's Lernraum Berlin e-learning platform on Monday morning. Numerous complaints appeared on the Lernraum Berlin Twitter account. In the course of the morning, the Lernraum team tweeted: "Work on groups 1 and 2 as well as groups 3 and 4 is currently delayed. The "Other Areas" network is not affected. IT admin is working hard to troubleshoot."

The districts of the city are divided into different groups: "Groups 3 and 4 were particularly affected on Monday morning because user numbers are particularly high here."

The following districts are grouped together in groups 3 and 4: Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Steglitz, Zehlendorf, Mitte, Reinickendorf, Pankow, Hohenschönhausen, Treptow and Köpenick.

Since December, the city-state government has hired various IT service providers - such as Infra.run - to fix the recurring technical problems at Lernraum Berlin. They say they are making progress in solving the problems - though they say it is not easy to work on the system as a whole while it's in operation.

Individual teachers had told Berliner Zeitung that there had also been technical problems at the HPI School Cloud, a digital space for hosting teaching materials so they can be accessed by pupils and teachers. Monday morning appears to present a technical challenge for school cloud servers - because a lot amount of teaching materials are uploaded and downloaded at the start of the week.