Internet service has been stable since it was restored around 12:30 p.m. Saturday (April 8). Unfortunately, WVU experienced a total of three outages this past week due to three different hardware failures:
· 49 minutes from 1:10 p.m. to 1:59 p.m., on Wednesday, April 5
· 10 minutes from noon to 12:10 p.m. on Thursday, April 6
· Nine hours from 3:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 8
Faculty should be aware that students who had deadlines during these outage windows would have been unable to submit work. However, at all other times, the internet was up, and so were critical systems such as single sign-on (WVU Login), Portal, eCampus and STAR.
WVU has redundant and resilient systems so, when one internet service provider fails, traffic is automatically rerouted to another. However, multiple hardware failures disrupted what is normally a seamless process, severing connections between the WVU main Data Center and the network cores on the Downtown and Health Sciences campuses. On Saturday, Information Technology Services staff members were not alerted because connectivity to the alerting system failed. Networking discovered the problem at 6:15 a.m. and was onsite by 6:30 a.m.
ITS has initiated the process to purchase and replace the hardware involved, which will occur as the equipment arrives throughout the week. ITS has taken steps to minimize the risk of additional outages, but cannot eliminate all risk of disruption as the team works to replace and test hardware during the coming days.
ITS is also investigating ways to make certain services more accessible and resilient when outages inevitably occur.