The site’s unreliable performance lasted throughout peak class hours, from 9:45 a.m. to 2:20 p.m.
“There were up to 4,000 sessions still going on, but there was also equal evidence that maybe half the requests throughout that period were failing,” said Mike Barker, assistant vice chancellor for teaching and learning at Information Technology Services.
Barker said patches applied to the system during regular maintenance early Thursday morning may be related to the outage, but ITS is not yet certain.
“We do not have an analysis of the ultimate cause,” he said.
Even without a complete explanation, Barker said ITS can take steps to prevent future problems.
“We do what we did today, which is go back to the most recent known good state,” he said. “We monitor all the systems, and we have folks attend to all of those systems and their interactions on a 24/7 basis.”
The outage prevented freshman Jon Mackanic from turning in a chemistry lab report on time.
“I recently hurt my leg, and I’m on crutches,” he said. “I couldn’t really go to the first lab, cause that was kind of dangerous, so I had to make up the lab and turn it in on Sakai.”
