BYU’s Y-Expense, Fast Track, and Cell Phone Office systems are once again online after being unavailable since June 20.
University employees are now able to use these services again to process both travel and purchase expense reports.
The university has not said why the systems were down, and down for so long, but would not take the possibility of a security breach out of the equation when asked Monday, July 3, about the status of the outage. The outage has only been referred to as 'maintenance.'
BYU services are sometimes taken offline for routine maintenance, but these measures are typically announced well in advance. The Y-Expense shutdown went unannounced and services were brought back online without announcement from the Office of Information Technology’s Twitter page.
Beginning Thursday, July 6, BYU is also changing security protocols for employees logging into campus computers remotely and must use an RDP gateway or Cisco VPN client. The university has also initiated a two-step authentication system for employees logging in to see certain personal and financial data, like paycheck and direct deposit information. Both of those changes were announced through campus email. The latter change was announced before the Y-Expense system shutdown.