Lane: unplugged

By Miguel Sanchez-Rutledge – January 21, 2016

Second internet outage in two months leaves students frustrated

Lane’s main campus experienced its second Internet outage since December’s disruption on Jan. 14, around 2 p.m. This time the outage did not prove as troublesome as last term’s, which was all day Dec. 2, 2015, but it did bring to mind how troublesome it can be.

Victoria Koldewyn, student and library assistant, spoke about how different the outage was compared to last term.

“Our class wasn’t affected too much.” Koldewyn said. “It wasn’t a big deal and it was only out an hour. Last term it was down for several hours and that was a big deal. We have offline methods where we could check out materials at the library but really it puts a screeching halt to everything.”

Cynthia Kocsis, library assistant at Lane’s main campus, recalled last term’s outage, stating that it was “frustrating.”

“We had to go back to hand scanning things in,” Kocsis said. “It creates more work, especially for supervisors.”

Both times the outages occurred during hours that were not of peak traffic for the library. But last term the outage occurred during the middle of finals week, a crucial time for students to be accessing web content.

“It definitely impacted students,” stated Mariana Paredones, Lane student and co-chair of Students of Color Coalition. Paredones recalled last term when a student was “working on one of her projects, and when the Internet stopped working it completely erased everything.”

Faculty also suffered from the outage. Faculty members were not notified of the outage immediately last term. This led to classes having to be cut short. Malia, a student at Lane, recalled having to leave class because of the outage. “I went to class and the teacher didn’t know about it,” Malia Hatch, student government senator, said. “The teacher was like ‘what, I didn’t know about that,’ so we leave class awkwardly. And it was dead week.”

In an email, Lane’s IT Leadership Team explained that the outage was due to “a problem with LCC’s core firewall that connects Lane’s network to the Internet,” and that this was very similar to December’s outage.

“Lane IT staff were able [to] resolve the problem without assistance from the vendor this time,” the email read.