The Queensland government should have staggered the return of students to school to prevent its learning portal from crashing on the first day of Term 2, a leading tech expert says.
Trevor Long said the government should have known its online learning portal would be under immense strain on Monday.
The portal crashed early on Monday, leaving parents and students unable to access remote learning amid the COVID-19 crisis.
The online portal is a vital tool for students to learn remotely under adult supervision.
Interim reports suggest the site had as many 1.8 million hits when it crashed. It was back online by the afternoon.
Mr Long said the crash was foreseeable and students should have returned to their lessons over two - if not more - days, and that would have allowed the education department to gauge the portal's capacity.
"The Queensland government and education department have had many weeks to plan for this and should have added more capacity," the Nine Network's resident tech expert said.
"Did some raise a red flag and say we may not be able to cope or did anyone suggest staggering the access to see if it could cope?
"They needed the students to social distance online to make sure the system can work."
Only the children students of essential workers, as well as vulnerable children, attended school in person on Monday.
High demand had resulted in a temporary disruption to the Learning@Home website, the Education Department tweeted, and it was working to resolve the issue.
Earlier, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was not aware of the crash.
"I think we always said there was going to be some teething issues and probably it's been overwhelmed by the number of people that are actually logging on ... so happy to look into that issue," the premier told reporters.
Director-General of Education Tony Cook said the servers received more than 1.8 million hits in less than half an hour.
"This type of learning at home model has never been implemented on a scale like this before and we will continue to monitor the performance of our systems," Mr Cook said.
"Right across the country, we know that a number of services are experiencing new peaks in demand on servers, content and applications."
Brisbane mother-of-two Julia Kabakoff spent 45 minutes trying to access online resources so her sons could begin their lessons from home.
But it quickly became apparent that links provided for online learning, and even the Education Queensland website, weren't coping with the volume of traffic.
"Meanwhile, I'm trying to do Zoom meetings for my own work and then try to scramble to find other things for the kids to do," she told AAP.
Nik, who is in Grade 5, and Xander, in Grade 2, had to wait for the system to recover before formally starting the term.
Australian Associated Press
