While a significant amount of students left campus for Fall Break, those students who remained faced several technical challenges, such as power outages, limited dining hours and no Wi-Fi.
On Saturday morning, students first encountered an Information Technology outage when PerunaNet, SMU’s Wi-Fi network, shut down.
“I woke up, and I was just like ‘Why isn’t it working,’ and then it just didn’t work,” said Annamarie Taylor, SMU first year. “It was frustrating being left on campus with no Wi-Fi and also because I didn’t know why it wasn’t working.”
At 8 a.m on Saturday, Rachel T. Mulry, director of IT Customer Service, contacted faculty, staff and students via email and explained the situation.
She wrote, “We are currently experiencing an outage of several services due to infrastructure issues related to critical maintenance that was performed overnight.”
Affected services included PerunaNet, Office 365 and student emails, my.SMU, Canvas, blog.smu.edu, the SMU library systems, the Pharo printing service and several other services.
Until PerunaNet was restored, students were able to connect wirelessly to EduRoam. IT worked throughout the entire day and night on Saturday to repair the outage. They anticipated to fix the services by noon on Sunday; however, complications restoring the storage array caused delays, and services were not fully restored until early Monday morning.
Some applications such as Voyager Library system, Pharos UniPrint system and Blackbaud still remain unavailable, and Mulry stated plans to release additional information about the outages later in the week.
In addition to technology issues, SMU also dealt with power outages over the break. On Friday afternoon, the Residential Community Directors of the Southeast Area residential commons alerted their students about the morning power outages that would take place on the Monday and Tuesday of Fall Break.
The outages were scheduled to occur between 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.; however, on both days, power was restored before anticipated. Affected buildings included the Mustang Parking Center, Armstrong Commons, Arnold Dining Commons, Loyd Commons, Ware Commons, Kathy Crow Commons and Crum Commons.
During this time, the affected buildings lost all electrical power, including air conditioning. In the newer commons, the doors open by electric card readers, so the RA-on-Call for each building was required to open the front entrance to any student who needed to enter the building during this time period.
Due to the power outages, Arnolds Dining Services did not open until 11 a.m., while Umphrey Lee opened at 7 a.m., and Einstein Bros Bagels opened at 10:30 a.m.
