Since the beginning of the semester, Oswego State has been dealing with some major outages that have been slowing down students and professors.
Blackboard and DegreeWorks have been experiencing intermittent service issues, which have resulted in slow response times or outages. This has resulted in a series of complaints toward the hosting provider for these services. Oswego State has had a total of seven outages that have occurred on four separate days, including four of them within one day, which was fixed on Sept. 6.
“Fortunately, DegreeWorks hasn’t been an issue with me thus far,” said Oswego State junior Brittany Cairns, “Blackboard, on the other hand, is always giving me problems when I try to log in, or it will take forever to load.”
Most of Carins’ projects and quizzes she has to send for one of her classes would be a constant issue for her, she said.
“I tried taking a quiz for my news reporting class, and the quiz would not show up at all,” Cairns said. “I just don’t understand, and it drives me insane.”
Students expressed they are not able to take quizzes or to turn in assignments, including senior Kyle Fitzgerald.
“It is very frustrating, and I’m sick and tired of these ongoing outages,” Fitzgerald said. “It hasn’t allowed me to submit two of my assignments for my finance class.”
He also mentioned that he would have to explain to his professor why he was a day late for turning in the assignments.
“It stinks for me and my professor because he likes to grade assignments the minute after the assignment is due just so he can stay on schedule,” Fitzgerald said. “Due to these outages that have been occurring, not only it is slowing me down, but it’s been slowing down my professor as well.”
Oswego State Campus Technology Services started to do some updates in the middle of the summer so the software and sites like Blackboard and DegreeWorks would still be up and running.
“In the middle of August, we updated to the SUNY cloud, and one of the schools had a service [virus,]” Chief Technology Officer of Campus Technology Services, Sean Moriarty said. “When that one specific school has a service [virus,] it affects us and so many schools.”
Oswego State is not the only one dealing with this issue. Several SUNY campuses are dealing with the damages with Blackboard and DegreeWorks as well.
A virus that usually shoots thousands of information “packets”, that contain computer requests is targeted to one certain campus. ITech would usually be handling 90,000 packets of information per second. However, during the attacks, Oswego was handling over 900,000 packets of information per second.
This got to a point where the FBI had to investigate, according to Moriarty. Oswego added a service-blocker to block a majority of computer requests.
“Our next step is to find the service-blocker to block all these viruses to be happening in the long-term,” said Moriarty. “I’m glad that it is getting better, but we still have some work to in order to fix this issue and to prevent it from happening.”
