The costly glitch gave "Saturday Night Live" something to laugh about.
It is hoped that one Massachusetts high school will finally be able to turn its lights off after almost a year and a half.
Nearly 7,000 lights in Minnechaug Regional High School have been on 24/7 since August 24, 2021 due to a computer glitch, according to reports.
The round-the-clock illumination came with a financial burden.
“I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News.
“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Osborne told the outlet. “We have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”
According to the high school’s student-run newspaper, The Smoke Signal, the computer server in charge of the lighting system, which was meant to be power-efficient, failed, and this isn’t the first time it has happened.
“On occasion, the software would go down and it would somehow get corrupted. We would try to recycle it and eventually everything would come back on,” Edward Cenedella, the director of Facilities and Operations for the school district told the school paper. “Unfortunately the last time it got corrupted it was unfixable.”
Luckily, the parts required to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China, according to Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, according to NBC News. They anticipate installing the new system over the February break, the outlet reported.
“And yes, there will be a remote override switch so this won’t happen again,” Mustone said, according to NBC News.
The incident gave “Saturday Night Live” something to joke about.
"The students are doing fine but the classroom hamster has gone insane,” co-anchor Colin Jost said in the “Weekend Update” segment of the show.
