Jim Hall, network services manager, said the information technology department carefully looked at MSU’s network before calling Time Warner Cable about the Internet outage that occurred Oct. 31, and although his department knows that Time Warner Cable was the source of the problem, he is still waiting on a full explanation from them to discern the source of the outage.
“When you’ve got a complex system of this nature you’ve got to be sure before you call somebody and say, your stuff is broken,” Hall said. “Well we got to that point and Time Warner reluctantly looked at their own configuration and then said, wait a minute. They put me on hold for a few moments and then finally they came back and said, I think we found something and then 20 minutes later we were back up.”
Hall said his department has a process to monitor the network and then ensure that it is brought back up as quickly as possible in the event of an outage such as last Thursday’s.
“You’ll see this monitoring system up out here and you’ll notice that each icon has a green arrow on it. If that arrow is not green, then we know there’s an issue,” Hall said. “So when we start seeing messages, people are dispatched to begin looking at where the issues are. It’s different from problem to problem.”
Many students were inconvenienced in a number of ways by the outage on Oct. 31.
“I was signing up for classes that day and the Internet at my apartment was down,” Ashley Tillman, senior in education, said.
Students whose classes are online were unable to access any class resources.
“It was a nuisance,” Allison Przybysz, junior in nursing, said. “I’m a nursing student and most of our stuff for our classes are online.”