On Tuesday 14 August, several university systems and services suffered from a system breakdown. This affected umu.se, aurora.umu.se, but also the Ladok student registry nationwide was shut down. How could this happen?
Late on Monday 13 August, Akademiska Hus, who owns most of the buildings on campus, conducted a planned power cut due to electrical work. A fault in the electricity supply caused the emergency power supply, which normally kicks in, to fail. This resulted in a shutdown of the primary data centre in the MIT Building. Unaware of the serious consequences, Akademiska Hus carried on performing power cuts and electrical work in several other buildings. In conjunction with the incident, another unfortunate fault occured that shut down the secondary data centre in the Administration Building as well. This in effect caused servers to shut down, systems were uncontrollably shut off causing problems for umu.se, aurora.umu.se, log on services to certain systems, the phone switchboard at Infocenter, and the national Ladok student registry, which Umeå University is in charge of.
On Tuesday, a power cut caused several university systems to shut down.
Photo: Per Melander
ITS worked intensely from Monday night to overlook and restart the systems cautiously. Some parts could be restarted already in the morning, but not until late on Tuesday evening, was ITS able to start practically all of the 1,000 servers. The work on seeing to the measures and restart systems that still suffer from after effects continues until everything is restored.
Beside the inconvenience for university staff who are dependent on our systems, the disturbances also caused a number of newly admitted students to contact us asking for access to their welcome letters. The web group that is intensely occupied with implementing the launch of our new web planned for 16 August also had to pause its work. The web launch will, however, still be completed as planned.
"We are talking about massive and complex systems that are necessary, but also make us vulnerable. Disturbances and breakdowns happen regularly, but most are handled without affecting the organisation. But shutdowns like these cause huge problems and take time to amend," says Ali Foroutan Rad, head of ITS, who apologises for any inconvenience caused by the system malfunction on Tuesday. And he is pleased that the problems were relatively smoothly resolved.