Over Memorial Day weekend the BYU Office of Information Technology scheduled its semi-annual updates of the BYU computer system. Computers and servers were expected to be down from Sunday night to early Monday morning, but the updates turned out to be anything but routine.
Nearly a week later many problems and glitches still remain for the IT office throughout campus, but significant damage has already been done.
“We lost several servers that they couldn’t restore at all,” said Lind Connell, Marriott School systems and support administrator. “We lost some of our production servers so we’ve had to go out and actually buy hardware and build servers from scratch. Luckily we haven’t lost any data on our web servers but we lost them for other applications that we run.”
Throughout campus, faculty and staff have been trying to work without having access to all of their resources.
Trent Nielson, an accounting student, works for the College of Family, Home and Social Sciences as a computer service representative and said everyone affected has had to be patient.
“Our hands have been tied as far as what we can do to fix it,” Nielson said. “Since we don’t service the servers in my department it’s been difficult, but we’ve been trying to appease the professors as best we can. It’s been hard because there isn’t one specific person to blame, everyone has been pretty frustrated about it.”
Restoration work is ongoing at both the university and department levels.
“We worked all night long,” Connell said. “We did a 36-hour straight shift in order to get everything up as quickly as possible. It’s been a big learning curve for us too, some sites were still running on an old code and we don’t have anyone here that knows how to set them up, so it’s been a process.”
Nancy Bailey, a tech transfer specialist at the Harold B. Lee Library, wasn’t greatly affected but many in her office were.
“Luckily, I was working as normal but everyone else was just in a bind,” Bailey said. “We couldn’t access things we need, and we were indirectly affected because we needed a form from a certain office and we couldn’t get it.”
For the latest updates on the restoration of the outages visit the OIT website.
