Internet Outage at Olivet College

What did you do when the Internet went down?

The Olivet College campus online network experienced an outage on March 3 at 5 a.m., knocking out internet, Wi-Fi, campus desk phones, Blackboard, MyOlivet, and access to all servers.

Provost Maria Davis said, in an email dated March 4, that the cause of the problem was that “the back-up switch failed almost simultaneously with the main network switch.” The email signaled the end of the outage, at approximately 11:30 a.m.

How did the campus cope through the more than 30 hour outage?

“I was mainly watching movies,” said John Gabrysiak, freshman, “I watched ‘Fast and Furious,’ ‘Fast 5,’ and ‘Fast and Furious 6’.” He was watching on his 4G LTE cellphone

“I couldn’t do much so I ate,” said Jamal Al’-Uqdah, junior

Assistant Professor Samantha Myers said, “I was at home this weekend, so I wasn’t affected by it and only knew about it through the school email.”

“I went to sleep until around 3 and hung out with people in real life,” said Henry Nulf, sophomore.

“Nothing that I could do because I couldn’t do homework,” said D’Angelo Williams, sophomore.

Audrey Helfrich, freshman, said, “Yes, I couldn’t do any of my homework. I didn’t fall back on any homework because my professor’s cool about it so he pushed it back.”

After being asked how the internet problem affected students, DJ Vore, freshman, said, “Considering everyone is a millennial and they couldn’t get on their social media, most people were irritated.” Vore also said, “I couldn’t access Blackboard for assignments, and couldn’t contact anyone about the Drag Show, and it really just affected my day to day life.”

“I feel like people should rely less on the internet and the apps included such as Netflix and Hulu, considering things like this could happen,” said Olivet freshman Mieah Bellgowan.

Freshman Brian Taylor said, “We pay too much money for this school for it [the Wi-Fi] to mess up like that.”

In her Monday email, Davis thanked students for their “patience” and called the incident an “extremely rare network hardware problem.”