EBS On-Cloud Outage Due to 'Bottleneck'... "Could Not Predict School Environment and Usage Patterns"

Ministry of Education Completes Expansion of Public Learning System Network and Servers
"Bottlenecks Occurred Due to Additional Features Like Chat"
"School Environment Not Fully Considered... Stabilization Expected Next Week"

[Asia Economy Reporter Han Jinju] The repeated errors in the EBS Online Class since the start of the semester have been found to result from the inability to predict usage patterns in school settings. The Ministry of Education is also considering budget support measures to allow the use of private platforms like Zoom, which are moving toward paid services, for classes.

A senior official from the Ministry of Education explained on the 10th, "In the case of EBS Online Class, there were restructuring issues, but unexpected variables emerged while implementing various functions. The private meeting service was adapted for class use, but schools tended to use the chat function extensively, and bottlenecks occurred due to additional features like chat."

The official added, "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the instability of the public learning management system. We did not fully consider factors that can occur in schools such as class division or combination, itinerant teacher class formation, and teacher authority distribution. There is a need to analyze user patterns and combine technology to improve, but we did not have much experience in these areas yet."

The main cause of the service disruption was bugs occurring during the service operation process, and stabilization is expected from next week. The official said, "Unlike last year, when hardware issues like DB expansion and network enhancement could be addressed, the current problems are largely in the coding domain. Fixing one bug leads to another. Infrastructure expansion measures have been completed, and we expect some stabilization after this weekend."

He continued, "To resolve the EBS Online Class issues, we have increased the development staff to about 60 and counseling staff to 45 to respond. Real-time monitoring showed that to fix video class errors, network capacity was expanded from 1G to 10G, and related servers were increased from 12 to 36 for reinforcement."

To make matters worse, the video conferencing service Zoom plans to end its free educational account service in July, causing confusion in schools. Regarding this, a Ministry of Education official said, "Not only Zoom but also as remote and blended learning become more active among teachers, budgets are being allocated to IT. We are considering ways to support teachers at the school or public level without personal costs, and we will create a plan soon."

As of 10 a.m. that day, the maximum simultaneous users of EBS Online Class were 148,947, with 32,429 connected to video classes. e-Hakseupter recorded a maximum simultaneous connection of 144,378 users, with 77,231 in video classes. The Ministry of Education explained that the participation rate in video classes is increasing on the eighth day of the semester.

The maximum capacity of e-Hakseupter and EBS Online Class is 3 million users each. For real-time video classes, e-Hakseupter can accommodate up to 300,000, and EBS up to 400,000. The Ministry of Education plans to expand servers as needed to accommodate demand.

The Ministry of Education is not considering reusing the existing EBS Online Class. Since the new semester has started and considering risks such as data migration, a new EBS Online Class service has been built and operated, with a policy to stabilize it as quickly as possible.

EBS Online Class started a new service in March that added functions such as video classes and attendance confirmation, replacing the temporarily built previous service. e-Hakseupter also added real-time video class functions. Since September last year, the Ministry of Education selected vendors and invested 6 billion KRW in these two services to prepare them. Although restructuring work was carried out for EBS Online Class, the development schedule was insufficient, leading to connection failures and issues such as progress rates or video class screens not displaying from the beginning of the semester.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.