VCU still working to find cause of network failure on first day of classes

Amir Vera
Contributing Writer

On VCU’s first day of classes, Aug. 23, many students had a difficult time knowing where to go when the Internet and many student services went down all over campus.

Information Security Officer Dan Han said the university is still working to find the cause of the problem.

“So far what we know is that there was some type of disruption to the VCU authentication services … log-in services and things like that,” Han said. “We’re working to find out what exactly is causing those things. We don’t believe it’s a security issue.”

Han said that a hacker or virus was ruled out after VCU Technology Services ran some forensic analyses on the system.

“There may have been some load issue. We are not sure at this point,” he said.

The loading issue may have been caused by so many students returning to campus and overloading the system, causing it to crash, Han said.

VCU Technology Services has put temporary fixes in place. The servers were restored by the afternoon of the outage.

“We redirected traffic to individual applications,” Han said. Instead of having a central place for authentication, students and faculty can just go to the individual applications such as Blackboard and eServices.

Han said that he and his team are working to find the root cause of the problem, but that they have not identified the issue for sure.

Students and faculty were able to run regular operations the next day, but many were still confused and upset by the failure of VCU’s infrastructure.

“I noticed that a couple of students could not check their email, their Blackboard or their schedule, so they didn’t know what room, what teacher or where they were going,” said Priya Venkatesan, freshman biology major, of the first day of classes.

Venkatesan was one of many students who were scheduled to take an online quiz that morning. She said she was freaked out, but ultimately finished her quiz. Other students, such as junior political science major Jordan Walthour, weren’t so lucky.

Walthour woke at 8 a.m. and only had one class. He said that his English class was moved and the professor had sent an email out late the night before.

Like many other students that day, Walthour had missed class because VCU’s systems had gone off-line.

To report future issues, visit ts.vcu.edu/helpit.html or for problems with services in VCU dorms, call ResNet Tech Support at (804) 828-8943.