During the spring term of 2017, DU had at least two substantial network outages that affected student and staff use of widely used university applications such as Pioneer Web, the library’s online resources, and Canvas. Both also killed the campus network connection to the public internet. In both cases, the applications and services remained available to users whose connection paths did not pass through the failed network elements. Thus, services hosted off campus (e.g. Canvas) continued to be available to users located off campus during the outages, and locally hosted services remained available to users on campus.
Network outages was attributed to a failure of a networking device on the campus, another to a failure in the network connection to the ISP providing service to the campus. Clearly, the immediate need was to restore service; service restoration was handled efficiently by IT technical staff and the ISP involved within a few hours in each case.