“Blocked by Fortinet.”
Appleton North students and staff on Oct. 29, during 7th hour (around 2 p.m.), found themselves unable to access Canvas, Classlink, Outlook, and many other online tools used daily on school-issued Chromebooks. For the rest of the day, online access in classes was put on pause, as they were blocked by the cybersecurity filter, as many websites were classified as an “unrated” category.
Students were unable to perform any work on their Chromebooks whatsoever, all because of a bug from software that was simply supposed to protect them from malicious websites. But how did this happen? And what is happening in the first place?
What is Fortinet?
Fortinet is a cybersecurity company, based in California, used to block certain websites throughout the Appleton Area School District. Although the program was intended to limit access to distracting media during class, Fortinet has long been scrutinized by students and teachers alike for being overly restrictive and often blocking websites that had long been used for academic purposes.
“The same program [Fortinet] that has been blocking all of these programs has completely stopped the East eSports Team,” said Zack Rockey, a student of Tesla Engineering Charter School.
“I’m not happy with it,” said Mr. Burt, a North math teacher. Another teacher at North, Mrs. Cooper, said that Fortinet has impacted her teaching ability in the past, and has also affected her personal device. Fortinet has been criticized for having many hurdles to jump through for school faculty to attempt to unblock a website, often being met with silence by the company, which is corroborated by Zack Rockey’s difficulties with unblocking games for East’s eSports team, and Noctiluca’s issues unblocking Noctiluca Livewire on Chromebooks.
What happened to my Chromebook?
As of Oct. 30, the Appleton Area School District IT department released an email to all district staff, explaining the situation to employees by stating: “Our filtering vendor has identified what is causing our issue and has implemented a fix. Since this issue is affecting the entire U.S., it may take some time for the fix to propagate across all of their data centers… we are still seeing Chromebooks perform very slowly. We expect significant improvement over the next 24-48 hours, but it would be best to plan on not having fully functional devices for tomorrow (Thursday, October 31st)”.
What happens next? How can this be remedied?
Despite the technology issues, teachers and school staff have proven themselves to be resilient and adaptable. For example, Mrs. Cooper handed out paper tests, and classes at Appleton East utilized desktop computers, which were affected less than the Chromebooks.
As of Oct. 31, the School District IT department released an email to all district staff, explaining the resolution to the situation by stating: “Fortinet updated the certificates and reversed their AWS (Amazon Web Services) changes. Services were partially restored by noon on 10/30/2024, with a full resolution by 4:30 p.m. that day. Fortinet is implementing additional safeguards to prevent a similar issue in the future.”
The district IT department additionally commented on the cause of the situation by stating: “Fortinet made updates to their AWS environment, causing issues with the certificates needed for the FortiClient WebFilter to connect. This led to all internet traffic being classified as “Unrated” and blocked for students, while staff experienced slow internet on their Chromebooks.”
