Pear Deck Learning Outage

Incident Resolved – Pear Deck Outage

The recent outage impacting Pear Deck services has been fully resolved. DNS records have now propagated across networks, and access to Pear Assessment should be restored for all users.

If you continue to experience any issues, these are most likely related to local network or device caching. In those cases, we recommend clearing your browser/device cache or reaching out to your IT Administrator to flush local DNS records.

We sincerely apologize for the disruption and appreciate your patience while our team worked to resolve this issue.

Reports of DNS issues have continued to reduce

We are continuing to receive a small number of reports of Apps being unavailable for some users. We are continuing to monitor the situation and will provide further updates as we discover solutions.

If you are using a School or District managed computer please reach out to your IT staff and forward this notice to them for assistance restoring access.

Many Districts and Schools have reported success resolving access issues with these previously communicated fixes and some additional steps:

1. Clearing DNS Caches across the network (https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Resolving-DNS-Propagation-Issues).
NEW: Some customers have found they have unexpected DNS servers provided by Software Defined Networking controllers, Wireless access points, and other IT equipment. These need to be cleared or disabled as is appropriate for your network.

2. Clearing DNS Caches on Computers (see https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Flushing-DNS-on-Operating-Systems-and-Web-Browsers)

3. NEW: For Chromebooks specifically: If DNS Caches do not clear from Chrome set a manual DNS override for the network connection, saving, and reverting. This seems to force the OS cache to clear.

4. NEW: To resolve Pear Assessment incompletely loading: Close all Pear Assessment browser windows, clear the Browser Caches to remove corrupted Pear Assessment assets, reload the app.

DNS issues appear to be focused in customer DNS deployments and at the Operating System and Browser level.

If you are using a School or District managed computer please reach out to your IT staff and forward this notice to them for assistance restoring access.

Enterprise Customers can reach out to our support to be connected with a Engineer for assistance.

Our monitoring scripts no longer detect invalid DNS records at the ISP and Public DNS level. We have reached out to customers and have found that their own DNS deployments may still be providing invalid records. Highly available deployments have had issues where just one of several servers in a DNS deployment have failed to invalidate the incorrect records and create downtime.

We have updated our help article (https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Resolving-DNS-Propagation-Issues) with examples of incorrect and correct DNS and an example of how to use the "dig" command to investigate on Linux and macOS. Windows based environments can use the nslookup tool.

If you are still affected, Action is Required:

IT Administrators are requested to clear DNS caches both locally and on any caching DNS proxies in use. This may include:

Local computer DNS caches
Network-level caching DNS proxies
Content filters
VPN services

For instructions on clearing DNS caches on your computer, please see this support article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Flushing-DNS-on-Operating-Systems-and-Web-Browsers

DNS propagation issues have continued to improve since the last update.

Level3 Communications, a large DNS provider for home and business Internet Service Providers, cleared their DNS cache at roughly 5PM Eastern Time. Other smaller DNS providers have cleared their caches as well. We believe that caches will continue to clear in the coming hours. We are continuing to scan for invalid records and will attempt to contact DNS providers when possible to correct the issue.

Customers with customized and/or internally hosted DNS deployments have had to verify and correct internal DNS systems. Of specific note is to verify that when multiple DNS servers have been deployed that they all have up to date records. The instructions linked below can help System Administrators with these issues. We will provide updates to this guidance in the morning if new information is available.

If you are still affected, Action is Required:

IT Administrators are requested to clear DNS caches both locally and on any caching DNS proxies in use. This may include:

Local computer DNS caches
Network-level caching DNS proxies
Content filters
VPN services

For instructions on clearing DNS caches on your computer, please see this support article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Flushing-DNS-on-Operating-Systems-and-Web-Browsers

For instructions on resolving Network Level and Content Filter Proxies, please see this support article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Resolving-DNS-Propagation-Issues

Note: You may still experience intermittent outages until full DNS propagation, the updating of our DNS information is complete.

We have identified an issue with DNS propagation. Updated Instructions below:

Action Required:
IT Administrators are requested to clear DNS caches both locally and on any caching DNS proxies in use. This may include:
Local computer DNS caches
Network-level caching DNS proxies
Content filters
VPN services

For instructions on clearing DNS caches on your computer, please see this support article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Flushing-DNS-on-Operating-Systems-and-Web-Browsers

For instructions on resolving Network Level and Content Filter Proxies, please see this support article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Resolving-DNS-Propagation-Issues

Note: You may still experience intermittent outages until full DNS propagation, the updating of our DNS information is complete.

We have identified an issue with DNS propagation.

Action Required:
IT Administrators are requested to clear DNS caches both locally and on any caching DNS proxies in use. This may include:
Local computer DNS caches
Network-level caching DNS proxies
Content filters
VPN services
For instructions on clearing DNS caches on your computer, please see this support article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Flushing-DNS-on-Operating-Systems-and-Web-Browsers
Note:
You may still experience intermittent outages until full DNS propagation, the updating of our DNS information is complete.

We have identified an issue with DNS propagation that may require IT Administrators to clear DNS caches locally and on any caching DNS proxies you may have in use. These can include content filters and VPNs. For clearing DNS caches on your computer please see this support article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Flushing-DNS-on-Operating-Systems-and-Web-Browsers

We are currently investigating an issue preventing Pear Deck Learning Products (Pear Deck, Pear Assessment and Pear Practice) from working as expected. Access to www.peardeck.com may be currently unavailable.

We have identified an issue with DNS propagation that may require IT Administrators to clear DNS caches locally and on any caching DNS proxies you may have in use. These can include content filters and VPNs. For clearing DNS caches on your computer please see this helpdesk article: https://support.goguardian.com/s/article/Flushing-DNS-on-Operating-Systems-and-Web-Browsers

Our teams are hard at work to resolve this issue and we will keep you updated here with the latest information. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

We are currently investigating an issue preventing Pear Deck Learning Products (Pear Deck, Pear Assessment and Pear Practice) from working as expected. Access to www.peardeck.com may be currently unavailable. Our teams are hard at work to resolve this issue and we will keep you updated here with the latest information. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.