The issue began at 3:27 p.m. due to “an unknown cause,” according to a statement posted on the Office of Information Technology website at 11:26 p.m. It was resolved at 1:44 a.m., according to the website.
Steven Sather, associate chief information officer and director of support service for OIT, said in an e-mail that all of the “1,000-plus” wireless service access points stopped working at about the same time Wednesday afternoon. Hard-wired Ethernet connections on campus were not affected by the problem.
“Usual trouble-shooting techniques — such as restarting the access points, disconnecting them from the network and then re-enabling them — were not successful,” he added.
Sather added that OIT networking staff and engineers from Cisco, the provider of the access points, were working to solve the problem but that there was no estimate for when they would resolve the issue.
When contacted by The Daily Princetonian around 6 p.m., a representative for the OIT Help Desk who asked not to be named said that it was a “very difficult” outage and that the technicians could be working at multiple locations to deal with the problem.
He added that the issue may not be fully resolved on Wednesday.
Sameen Haroon ’13, a residential computing consultant for Whitman College, said that the RCC e-mail queue received an “insane amount of e-mails” during the outage regarding the wireless network problems faced by students.
That day, RCCs in Forbes and Whitman also participated in a previously scheduled event called Dorm Storm, which required them to knock on doors and offer computer assistance to every student in the college. If students did not answer, RCCs would try again a second time.
Haroon said that she spoke with several people who did not even have access to the University webmail service during her Dorm Storm rounds, noting that she supplied Ethernet cords to students when necessary.
Students reported having varying levels of access to wireless Internet throughout the evening. While some had full access to the Internet, others reported only being able to access the University network, and others said they had no service without Ethernet cords.
Upon discovering the outage, several students on campus headed to locations with cluster computers that did not rely on the wireless network.
“It wasn’t that inconvenient [for me], though I imagine it’d be inconvenient for many other students,” said Gaku Liu ’12, a student who went to use the cluster computers in Frist Campus Center.
Still, Adriana Estor ’12 said that when she went to the Whitman College library around 6:30 p.m. to use a cluster computer, she found that they were all being used. She explained that while she was eventually able to use a computer, it was “definitely a problem” that there was an outage during a time when many students do their schoolwork.
Samuel Kim ’12 said that the network outage was “irritating” and would likely affect the quality of the homework that he had to turn in the next day. He eventually decided to use the computer clusters in Wilcox Hall.
“I’ve noticed that a lot of things have been out of whack with OIT,” he said.
Editor's Note: The OIT website listed this issue as resolved at 1:44 a.m. and the online version of this article reflects this change.
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