During the weeks of Sept. 2 to Sept. 11, Wartburg College experienced a campus-wide internet outage, leaving students without access to My.Wartburg, the GET app and other online resources.
The Tuesday following first year move in, Sept. 3, the Wartburg ITS staff noticed the first signs of an issue when they arrived at work in the morning.
Andrew Brockway, the Technical Operations Manager at Wartburg, says that the cause of the internet outage was a hardware failure that caused data corruption. Once the outage was noticed by the ITS department, they worked on restoring the services as quickly as they could.
Many students found themselves unable to access Wartburg’s canvas website to do their assignments, as well as other troubles with their everyday tasks.
“I couldn’t do any of my homework, so I was like, really behind in some of my classes,” second-year Sydney Bochmann says.
This issue caused professors to move back assignments and projects, which causes workdays in the future to be more crammed to fit the new workload schedule.
The ITS department shares they will be investing in new hardware to replace the items that failed during the outage. ITS will also work on getting their systems updated, so that a similar issue does not arise.
The Wartburg ITS department shares their appreciation for the flexibility of the campus as they navigated resolving the issue.
“Honestly, I’d like to thank everybody for being patient as we work through things,” Brockway says. “I understand it can be super stressful, especially the first week of school, I thought a lot of the students, the staff, and the faculty we spoke with were all very understanding, very supportive, and very patient.”
“I would reach out to our help desk, whether you stop in by walking through the door, sending an email to tech line or calling our number that out there on the ITS site,” Brockway says.
To contact Wartburg ITS, reach their phone number at +1(319) 352-8767, use their email [email protected] or stop by their office in CTC 101.
