On Wednesday, May 1st, many Sartell students noticed their mobile data was not working. They were losing coverage inside the school and realized they couldn’t send their all-important streak snaps. Panic really began to set in when students started to talk to their fellow peers who were having the same issues as them.

Almost as fast as the outage started, rumors about the cause started as well. First came the more logical rumors: maybe it’s just a broken cell tower or the transformer that blew earlier that week. Then the more ridiculous ones started circulating. The most popular of which being that somehow the administrators were jamming the signal.

Word spread like wildfire and the rumors were everywhere. As you walked down the hallways you could hear every theory and complaint. Students were mad about their lack of data and inability to Snapchat, so they resorted to spreading rumors about the cause.

In reality, the answer was a lot more benign than the theories. These data outages happen all the time, all around the country and have many causes. Usually, it’s just one piece of the complex infrastructure that grants LTE coverage not working properly. Verizon fixed the issue relatively swiftly with data returning to the students on Thursday.

One student said, “I am upset with the outage, my family pays good money for unlimited data and I become annoyed when I can’t use said data.”