IBM blames DOE contract when asked why NYC remote school system failed during snowstorm

IBM pointed the finger Wednesday at the city Department of Education for the remote learning system failure that left parents, students and teachers outraged and frustrated during last month’s snowstorm.

Officials for the tech company said its contract with the DOE didn’t cover the bandwidth required to withstand the public school system’s more than 900,000 students and their teachers logging on at the same time.

“It was not a failure of IBM technology,” IBM senior State Executive for New York Vanessa Hunt said, adding it would be a “disservice to not identify the root cause of this event.”

The revelation came during a City Council hearing about the system failure that took place when the department insisted on going remote the day of the February storm.

“The department’s use of ISV (IBM Security verify) was simply not contracted to support the nearly one million students and their teachers logging in at the same time,” Hunt told lawmakers, referring to the tech DOE uses as its remote login and identity management system.

The hearing followed weeks of finger-pointing over the fiasco, including Schools Chancellor David Banks’ claims that “IBM was not ready for primetime.”