St. Thomas’ online network system is fully functioning again after Information Resources and Technology experienced a full network outage Monday, causing major problems for students and professors.
The problem was discovered at 7 a.m. Monday, when St. Thomas Information Resources and Technology noticed the university’s homepage was not responding. All St. Thomas Internet resources, including Blackboard, Outlook and the university’s homepage, were down due to the outage and gradually restored in the afternoon hours.
Chris Gregg, who was named interim vice president for IRT on Tuesday, said the department was able to bring the resources back in stages throughout the day, starting with Outlook email returning around 2:45 p.m.
“(The system) is designed to have kind of two controllers, so it doesn’t have problems like this,” Gregg said. “Working with our vendor, we believe that it had kind of a software bug … It caused one of those two controllers to stop working properly, and it was supposed to fall over to the second controller. It didn’t do that the way it was supposed to.”
Gregg said most systems were fully functioning by 5:30 p.m. Monday; however, there were a couple of resources that IRT’s server administrator continued to restore into the evening.
“They were for the most part secondary systems that people don’t generally use but things that had to get going again,” Gregg said.
The outage caused problems for students, preventing them from access to email and homework.
“I couldn’t print a problem set for my microeconomics class, a paper for my microeconomics class and a handout for my accounting class, as well as not being able to check Blackboard for handouts this morning because I wasn’t able to get through the website,” sophomore John Hunt said. “I’m just hoping they’ll accept it when I come into class, but I don’t know.”
The server issue also caused problems for classes Monday morning.
“My first class we had a reading on Blackboard, and nobody could access it including the professor,” sophomore Lauren Curtwright said. “None of us had our homework, and the professor didn’t have the reading up. So it just made class really difficult.”
Professors had issues with the outage as well, as they weren’t able to send materials and post to Blackboard.
“I did hear from my ethics professor that the professors were also having trouble accessing their accounts and their emails,” Curtwright said. “He talked about how he and a few of his colleagues were in their office, and they were having an issue accessing Blackboard and getting ready for class, so I think it’s affecting everyone.”