According to Christi Cloud, director of instructional technology and data solutions, the core switch, which runs the high school’s network, crashed at 3 a.m. on Oct. 20. It was repaired a day later but crashed again within three days of activity. The administration has placed a new switch on order, but the replacement has not yet arrived.

“We expedited an order yesterday when it crashed,” she said. “Until now, we are just at the mercy of the vendor to get a core switch here.”

Because a core switch channels all incoming data to maintain connectivity in a network, all technological devices connected to the Carmel High School servers are affected by this crash. The voicemail feature of Carmel High School phones, which uses this network, are thus, also affected.

“Everything is functioning; it’s just that it’s at (a degraded) level,” Cloud said. “Voicemail sometimes work and sometimes does not, because it’s trying to handle all the traffic at a reduced capacity.”

Although the network connectivity is only an issue within Carmel High School, staff emails across the district will work intermittently since email domains are, according to Cloud, “housed in Carmel High School.”

“We apologize for the inconvenience; we were replacing other network equipments this weekend at Carmel Elementary to try to avoid these types of issues. But unfortunately, this type of thing can happen, where a piece of technology, you know, fails. And so this is what happened in this situation; we’re doing everything as quickly as possibly to get this situation rectified.”