Campus internet network disrupted, students express concerns

The campus internet network unexpectedly failed, leaving community members unable to access the network for over 12 hours on Oct. 13-14.

According to the Office of Information Technology’s website, the unscheduled outage started Thursday at 2:35 p.m. and was finally resolved on Friday, Oct. 14, at 3:42 a.m.

While students colloquially deemed the outage as a WiFi issue, the Internet failure was actually unrelated to the wireless internet network.

“The University experienced two interruptions Thursday to campus internet service. They were related to the failure of a component in one of the devices that connects Princeton to the internet. The issue was not directly related to the WiFi network,” wrote Assistant Vice President for Communications Daniel Day in an emailed statement.

Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Jay Dominick deferred comment to Day.

The outage inconvenienced many students reliant on the Internet to access material for coursework.

“The WiFi outage was inconvenient for me, because I had homework to do that required the usage of the internet,” Uri Schwartz ‘20 said. “For example, I had to watch lectures for Computer Science 126, which I have to be online to watch, and so ... I was unable to watch them and thus had a lot to catch up on. I also wasn’t able to access problem sets for courses ... because they were all on Blackboard. It was just an inconvenience.”

The lack of internet access was also problematic for extracurricular activities that rely on Thursday-only meetings to accomplish their goals, such as the USG Mental Health Initiative committee.

“Although it was unexpected, we were still able to get most of our meeting items completed by asking members to review shared documents after the meeting,” MHI co-chair Nathan Yoo '17 said. “Since we didn't have urgent deadlines (say, an assignment due at midnight) the WiFi outage was an annoyance, but could have been disastrous for others.”

For many students, the blackout underscored the depths of the University community’s reliance on internet access.

“Princeton’s education system functions primarily under the assumption that we, as students, have access to virtually limitless information,” Alexander Kirschenbauer '20 said. “Without internet access, we are unable to meet that expectation, and therefore can’t successfully complete our work.”

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The University experienced a similar outage on March 27, 2016, for around two hours. The University’s wireless networks were down for about two hours on Sunday afternoon around 1:50 p.m. and were restored around 4:05 p.m. The March outage was caused by a router crashing.