TIFU by accidentally removing web filtering from upwards of 750 middle school student computers.

To be fair, this happened a few weeks ago, but I was too busy not getting fired to think about it the day it happened.

As my username suggests, we utilize Microsoft Azure/Endpoint Manager(Intune) to manage our windows devices at the school district I am employed with. Ever since COVID hit our part of the country (USA), all students were issued a 1:1 device, so every student and staff member has some kind of mobile device (iPads in elementary, different types of laptops for Middle and High school).

Endpoint Manager has a feature called “supersedence” that essentially tells an application “delete the old version before installing this new one.”

We push out an application to the devices that handles all web filtering (preventing the students from going to sites they shouldn’t, both per acceptable use and the Child Internet Protection Act).

My mistake was trusting that a function within Endpoint Manager worked as it should, and not realizing that the aforementioned feature was in “Preview” (Microsoft’s way of saying “don’t use this anywhere important because we won’t help if it blows up).

From my end, I ran tests on about 10 devices and everything worked perfect, decided to deploy to one Middle School (about 750 students) and to be honest forgot about it with everything else I had going on.

Fast forward two weeks later and a students device gets brought to my boss because they had some highly inappropriate/borderline illegal content on their device.

We investigate to see what happened only to find out that 600+ student devices failed to install the new filter.

Some even said it had it on there already, though I verified it didn’t.

Essentially it just deleted the old version and then did nothing, so for two weeks an entire middle school could go anywhere in the internet they desired.

I scrambled around with one other technician and put my hands on every computer in that school and made sure they all had the new one installed.

Took about a week and I had to confiscate about 100 devices and wipe them, but crisis ultimately averted.

TLDR: Trusted Microsoft product to work, instead of replacing internet filtering on student devices, ended up just deleting it for two weeks, allowing middle schoolers to go to any website.