Help
If something is broken right now, start with the first two answers.
It says operational, but the service isn’t working for us
This is the most common situation, and there are three explanations in order of likelihood:
- The problem is on your end. Press Is it us, or is it them? on that service’s row. We check from our servers and your browser checks at the same time, and the two answers together usually settle it. If we can reach it and you can’t, it is your internet, DNS, content filter, firewall, or one device.
- The vendor hasn’t admitted it yet. Status pages are written by people, and they often go up after the outage does. Press No on Is it working for you? — you’ll see whether other schools are reporting the same thing, which is usually faster than the vendor.
- Part of it is down and the rest is fine. Open the components list on that row. A vendor can report themselves operational overall while the one piece you use is broken.
What the statuses mean
| Operational | The vendor says everything is working. |
| Minor issues reported by the vendor | The vendor has acknowledged something small — slowness, one feature. |
| Partial outage reported by the vendor | The vendor says part of their service is down. |
| Major outage reported by the vendor | The vendor says the service is down. |
| Status unavailable: we could not check this service | We could not check. This does not mean the service is down. It means their status page didn’t answer us, or our own checks have stalled. We show this rather than leaving the last known answer up, because a stale green during an outage is worse than admitting we don’t know. |
Every status carries the time we last checked it. If that time is old, treat the status with suspicion — and we’ll say so on the page.
Where this information comes from
Each vendor’s own published status page, read every couple of minutes. We don’t have inside knowledge and we’re not told anything before you are.
That’s a real limit worth understanding: vendors under-report. An outage affecting thousands of users can go unmentioned on the vendor’s own page for an hour or more. That’s exactly why every row has a link to user reports, and why Is it working for you? is there.
The three links on every row
- Official status page — the vendor’s own word. Authoritative when it says something, silent more often than it should be.
- User reports — what other people are reporting publicly. Usually the earliest signal, but it’s a crowd, not a source.
- Support — where to open a ticket, once you know it’s them.
Sharing your dashboard
The link works for anyone — no login, no account. Put it on a staff handout, pin it in Teams, or tape it to the office wall.
- A link —
downdash.etpcampus.com/your-name - On your website — an embeddable panel that updates itself
- A badge — a small image showing overall status, for a wiki or an intranet page
- A feed — RSS, if you’d rather have changes pushed into Teams or a reader
All four are free. You’ll find them at the bottom of your dashboard and in your admin settings.
Who can see our dashboard?
Anyone with the link. It is not listed anywhere and not in search results unless you switch both of those on deliberately.
We default them off for a specific reason. A public page naming your school alongside the exact vendors you use tells anyone writing a phishing email which vendor to impersonate. That may still be a trade you want — plenty of schools do — but it should be a decision, not a default.
Getting told without looking
Free: subscribe to your dashboard’s RSS feed. Teams and Google Chat both read RSS, and it costs nothing.
Paid: email, Teams and Slack alerts when a status changes, plus a morning summary of anything that happened overnight. We only alert on changes that hold — a service blipping for one check never sends anything — and we never wake you to say we couldn’t reach a status page unless you ask us to.
Paid also lets you tell your whole staff in one click: “FACTS is down, we know, you do not need to report it.” Worth allowing our sending domain before you need it.
A service we use isn’t in your list
Ask for it at the bottom of your services page. Tell us the name and their website, and we go and find their status page ourselves — then add it for every school, not just yours. That is the point of keeping one central list rather than asking each school to hunt down status page addresses.
If it is urgent, support@etpcampus.com reaches a person.
Still stuck
support@etpcampus.com. A real person reads it.