­­Since the begining of the semester students and faculty have been dealing with BlazeView outtages.

VSU faculty and students experienced problems trying to access the VSU web page due to the heavy amount of traffic the site was receiving.

Even more students stated that they were unable to access their e-mail accounts on Windows Live last Wednesday around 3 p.m.

Although the e-mail accounts were created through Valdosta, the actual problem was with Microsoft.

The outage was caused by a networking interruption in one of the North American data centers which affected all of their North American customers.
Since then their data center’s networking facilities have been remediated.

Microsoft stated that it will continue to monitor the overall network closely.

The first outage happened Monday Aug. 15, around 10 a.m.

The VSU homepage was unavailable to both faculty and students because of the inefficient code comprising the main page.

The Information Technology department already had a solution in place to help with the problem and is now working on placing a long-term solution to provide high availability for high demand and maintenance scenarios.

Later that week VSU faculty and students experienced problems trying to access as VSU’s HallNet, BlazeView, as well as Windows Live.

On Monday around 11 a.m. the VSU HallNet network experienced an outage as well.

The wireless network experienced an unusually high demand with a 50 percent increase in the number of devices that are linking up to it.

The IT department has fixed the problem but is asking that students help as well by turning off idle Wi-Fi devices when they are not in use.

Last Tuesday around 7 p.m. and Thursday around 11 a.m. neither students nor faculty was able to access BlazeView as well as this week too.

When asked what she thought the problem might be, Jacqueline Ruffin, a senior psychology and criminal justice major, stated, “I think VSU over shot how much internet capacity they would need to accommodate all of their students.”

Ruffin, who has an online class and also classes that are partially online also stated, “With BlazeView going it has put me behind in my classes and now my professors are cramming information because we lost a week of learning and assignments.

The first failure with BlazeView was apparently due to memory issues that developed on the database server and the second failure was due to normal node maintenance.

Joe Newton, director of Information Technology, stated that BlazeView has been updated to keep similar occurrences from happening in the future.

“We are addressing a possible hardware issue on the database server and adjusting out protocol for maintenance of nodes during working hours,” he said.