Technical Services to update WiFi systems early Tuesday morning

By Morgan Wahler | October 9, 2017 5:24pm
dsc-0034
The WiFi at the University of Portland has crashed multiple times in the past few weeks.
Media Credit: The Beacon / The Beacon

If you were on campus this past week, you probably noticed the WiFi outages Monday, Sunday, last Tuesday and last Sunday. According to Michelle Sunderland, director of Technical Services, the first crash last Sunday lasted about one and a half hours. 

This primary data center has a pre-scheduled system hardware maintenance upgrade coming up during fall break. However in light of the most recent WiFi outages, Sunderland’s team will be applying an urgent update to the faulty system. 

According to Chief Information Officer Curtis Pederson, the system will be updated the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 10, from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m.

“We are monitoring that system closely until the upgrade,” Sunderland said. “I feel confident that after the upgrade the problem will be fixed.”

Sunderland’s team is still working to figure out the root cause of the WiFi crashes. Each crash has stemmed from the same system and presumably the same issue, according to Sunderland. Although the exact cause of the outages is still unknown, Sunderland said the crashes were not caused by too many people using the network at once.

“There was an outage in our primary data center,” Sunderland said. “It impacted many of our core services, including WiFi."

B