Cause of wireless outage still unknown

The Office of Information Technology has not yet determined what caused Wednesday's unprecedented wireless network outage, which knocked out wireless Internet service Wednesday afternoon and evening, according to Steven Sather, associate chief information officer and director of support service for OIT.

"At this point, we are continuing to work diligently to determine the underlying cause of the outage," he said in an e-mail.

The problem began at 3:27 p.m., when more than 1,000 wireless access points stopped working due to an "unknown cause," according to a statement on the OIT website. The issue was formally resolved more than 10 hours later, at 1:44 a.m.

OIT networking staff and engineers from Cisco, the provider of the access points, attempted to solve the outage by using "a variety of network analysis tools ... to see if there was anything out of the ordinary with network traffic," Sather said.

The outage was limited to wireless access; users were still able to use Ethernet cables to connect to the Internet.

Sather said that OIT needs to determine the cause of the outage before "we can most appropriately determine if any changes to the system need to be made."