Emma Polen | Editor-in-Chief
The network outage that impacted Duquesne on Wednesday was caused by a hardware failure through their internet service provider, according to Tom Dugas.
The outage lasted roughly six hours.
Dugas is the Associate VP and Deputy Chief Information Officer and the Chief Information Security Officer of Computing and Technology Services at the university.
First, Dugas and his team identified that there was a hardware failure with Duquesne’s internet service provider, First Light. According to Dugas, First Light is responsible for most of the educational internet networks in Pennsylvania.
“The challenge we’re facing now,” Dugas said, “is that our internet conductivity is so dependent on everyone else on the internet that something else happens that could impact the way that we get service.”
Therefore, a network outage from First Light, or even Microsoft, will result in residual outages on Duquesne’s campus.
Once First Light found where the hardware failure was that was creating a disruption, “they were able to get our network traffic back to where it needed to be and get us back operational,” Dugas said.
Dugas also celebrated his team’s work at Duquesne to identify and address the problem as quickly as possible. As of Wednesday afternoon, they remained “focused on what they need to do to make sure there’s no further issues with the network,” he said.
Around 3 p.m. Wednesday, the issue was resolved. IT Service Desk sent out a campus-wide email, stating, “The issue affecting the campus internet connection has been resolved as of approximately 3 p.m. Students, faculty and staff can now connect to the campus network without further disruption.”
“Students can get back to where they need to be,” Dugas said.