Internet access at Ohio University lapsed for several hours Tuesday evening, prompting several hours of frustration for students.
Institutional Technology reported that it first began receiving complaints that campus networks were down around 8:45 p.m. Tuesday night. The network was not restored until around 12:30 a.m., said Sean O'Malley, communications director for OU Information Technology.
The cause for the outage has yet to be determined. The outage was still under investigation at press time yesterday, and IT had no further details about the outage to disclose, O'Malley said.
The entire university network was affected
O'Malley said, adding that all of the OU's regional campus networks experienced the outage as well.
The outage also affected student identification cards. Students were unable to swipe ID cards at dining halls and markets because account balances on the cards could not be accessed from the university database, O'Malley said.
Card readers allowing students into the dorm were generally not affected, though O'Malley said IT received isolated reports that some Shively Hall doors would not let students in. Cards also worked for laundry services and other functions, he said.
The locks are designed to work offline O'Malley said, adding that the cards denied entry were most likely new ID cards which had not yet been recognized by the locks.
On-campus businesses also had problems as machines would not read ID cards or credit cards. The Front Room Coffeehouse managed cash transactions with pencil and paper, keeping a private bank and tracking inventory the next morning, said employee Kyle Santora.
You can't just turn away hundreds of people he said.
Outages such as this are very uncommon. O'Malley said the university's internet has only lapsed once in the past year; last November an extensive network outage occurred, knocking out the internet on campus for about 1 hour, 25 minutes but was quickly corrected.
We found the cause to be a piece of equipment that needed to be reconfigured
O'Malley said.
In a separate incident in August, OU and surrounding areas also saw a brief loss of Internet access after an underground fiber-optic cable was severed; likely the result of a construction accident, O'Malley said. In that incident, the university only lost Internet access for 30 to 60 minutes.
- Tristan Navera
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Tristan Navera
