What’s wrong with the on-campus network?

The on-campus network has experienced several brief outages since the start of classes last week. OneIT has been working diligently to identify and solve the problem. It is our intention to provide a stable and reliable network and we recognize how disruptive to teaching, learning and work, these outages are. We installed new equipment over the summer which has worked flawlessly until last week.

Troubleshooting this type of sporadic problem is difficult. For example, why has it only happened on Tuesday and Thursday, not Monday, Wednesday or Friday? The on-campus network is large and complicated; every day we have more than 50K devices successfully connecting to the internet, accessing data and sharing information. To troubleshoot a problem like this, we first have to isolate what part of the network is involved and then, working with the vendor, identify the exact cause and fix the problem. On Tuesday August 30th, we took the extreme action of replacing important hardware during the middle of the day to hopefully stablize the network. Early results indicate that this step helped but we are continuing to monitor.

We can’t get back time lost because of these interruptions but we want to assure you that we are taking this problem very seriously, understand the negative impact and are working day and night to resolve this issue.