[su_heading size=”21″]Students and faculty members were agitated last week when a widespread network outage shut down York’s web-based services. [/su_heading]MyMail, Moodle, the York homepage, and Flex accounts were all affected by the outage, which started at 7:20 p.m. on March 19.
Christopher Russel, director of ICT infrastructure and information security officer at York, says the outage was caused by a breaker being tripped during inclimate weather on the evening of March 19.
This caused a power outage on the Keele campus, and University Information Technology supply units failed. Some elements of York’s core network then lost power.
“With some exceptions, nearly all services were affected since they rely on the network,” says Russel.
“In some cases the service itself was still functioning, but it wouldn’t have been possible to connect to it. Parts of the network, including internet access for Keele campus student residences, were not directly impacted and continued to function.”
Pardis Aliakbarkhani, a third-year professional writing and anthropology student, says, “I had an assignment due that night through Moodle, and I was locked out of everything York-related. It was really frustrating.”
Between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. on March 20, nearly all services affected by the outage were restored. Some services however, were not fully restored until midday on March 20.
Russel says a network error would not allow for correct diagnosis of network problems right away, and technical teams referred to a process of elimination to figure out what the problems were.
“In all, over 800 servers and systems were checked on and brought back into service,” says Russel.
Russel says scenarios like this have been successfully tested in the past.
UIT is currently working with the network vendor to ensure this problem is fully understood to reduce chances of this happening again.
Ashley Glovasky
Deputy Copy Editor
