Univ. experiences network outage for five hours on first day of finals
On Monday, April 30, the University experienced severe network outages that interfered with the University Wi-Fi and other online services, such as LATTE and PeopleSoft. According to an email from Provost Lisa Lynch, the network outage lasted roughly from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m.
At 12:44 p.m., Chief Information Officer Jim La Creta sent an email to the community explaining that prior to 11 a.m., Internet and Technology Services had begun to investigate reports of a network outage. At the time, the investigation determined that the internet was down and could be intermittently available.
The cause of the outage and plan for remediation remained unknown until 3:20 p.m., when La Creta notified the community that ITS had isolated the incident as a malfunction in the network hardware. At this point, ITS had begun working to restore the services.
The email explained that “priority for restoring services [would] start with basic networking, including eduroam and then core institutional services, LATTE, PeopleSoft, etc.”
Because the outage occurred on the first day of finals, Lynch requested that all April 30 course submission deadlines be extended to the same time on Tuesday, May 1, so that students could have the opportunity to complete and submit their work. The outage did lead to the cancellation of at least one class’s final exam — COSI 12B, “Advanced Programming Techniques.”
La Creta sent out another email at 6:59 p.m. in which he announced that eduroam and LATTE were both fully functional. He added that PeopleSoft and some other modules would still require a few more hours before becoming fully functional and residual delays would still exist. He apologized for the inconvenience that the five-hour delay caused to students.
In an email to the Justice, La Creta further detailed the specific causes of the outage, which began at exactly 10:45 a.m. According to the email, a network switch — which enables communications between devices — in the Feldberg Communication Center malfunctioned, causing servers and all on-site systems and services (LATTE, BUSS, sage, PeopleSoft, etc.) to stop working.
To resolve the issue, all servers and associated systems on campus were restarted, and the corrupted data was restored to its original state in the restart process.
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