Boston University’s system of network servers failed yesterday morning, leaving thousands of students, faculty and administration without access to email and any information hosted on the bu.edu URL.
The university postponed graduate student registration, which was scheduled to begin today, until Friday at 7 a.m., BU spokesman Colin Riley said.
“The server is down and is being worked on aggressively,” he said yesterday afternoon. “The Registrar’s Office is very prudent and will make sure any problem is rectified before they proceed with graduate registration.”
The Information Technology Office repaired the server yesterday, restoring access around 4:45 p.m.
“They have all hands on deck right now trying to resolve it,” Riley said.
IT Consulting Services Director Jim Stone, who has worked at the university for 22 years, said a combination of multiple server failures “caused a cascading effect.”
“This is the worst outage we’ve ever had on the web in years,” he said. “We’ve never had an outage like this. Our priority is to restore service — do whatever it takes. That was the mantra, and that was what everyone was trying to do.”
IT has backup equipment to maintain service during server failures, but Stone said these failed this morning as well. He said the department feels “very badly” about the server failure.
“You just can’t anticipate every single action that’s going to occur,” he said.
Because of the failure, IT staffers are evaluating the department to determine if any changes should be made.
“If, as a result of our evaluation, we feel that there are not sufficient systems and backup systems in place, then we would do something about that,” Stone said. “Otherwise, we would risk this again.”
He said the inconvenient timing of the failure, coinciding with graduate registration, added “insult to injury.” To get the word out about the extended deadline, the university emailed all graduate students.
“We wanted a very conservative, new deadline to make sure things were stable all the way through tomorrow and Thursday to make sure the graduate students could get through this process without difficulty,” he said.
Although failures similar to yesterday’s are rare and IT’s backup facilities have previously covered past events, Stone said in an age of increasing technology, the demand for electronic services are great.
“People become and are extremely dependent on electronic services today,” he said. “That means email, web services, filesharing services . . . People simply demand it work 100 percent of the time.”