The CSU Stanislaus Turlock and Stockton campuses were met with a system wide network outage last week that cancelled classes and left students, faculty and staff with little answers as to when service would be restored. An email sent to the campus community on Feb. 16 said the university was experiencing “significant technical difficulties at both campuses due to external factors.”
The email said the outage impacted Zoom, Office 365 and other network connectivity; however, it did not mention Canvas and My Stan State, which were also affected. All classes were cancelled on Friday, Feb. 17 as the university worked to resolve the matter. But as classes resumed Monday and Tuesday it was clear the issue was far from resolved.
According to another email sent to the campus community at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday evening, connectivity was still unavailable and all online courses  have been cancelled through Friday, Feb. 24, while in-person as well as components of hybrid courses will continue to meet. 
In an email Tuesday evening to the Signal from Dr. Rosalee Rush, Senior VP for Communications, Marketing & Media Relations at Stan State, Rush said the Office of Information & Technology (OIT) detected a service disruption last week that required them to temporarily take certain computer systems offline.
“Stanislaus State’s investigation of this disruption is ongoing, and we are focused on restoring our systems as quickly and securely as possible,” Rush said.
Amber Huk (senior, Creative Media) returned from Hawaii last week with the hopes of producing her first video assignment as a new student assistant videographer for the Signal. The Stan State tennis player, who had just competed with her team at a tournament in Oahu, came back armed with plenty of footage to edit together a recap of her teams experience. Like every other student on campus Thursday, Huk was met with the campus-wide system outage.
The disruption was especially concerning to Huk, who lives on campus, because she doesn’t own a car to be able to find Internet off-campus to do her work. 
“I haven’t been able to do anything on my laptop because I don’t have a hotspot on my phone,” she said. “Sometimes all I can do is listen to music on my phone, because nothing else works.” 
She said that even if she did have a hotspot, cellular service in the dorms is spotty, at best, taking as long as 15 minutes to send a text message at times. 
“I just got back from Hawaii with the Stan State tennis team and it feels like I haven’t left the plane,” she said. 
She added that she hasn’t been able to access the Adobe Creative Cloud either, which is a vital tool for Creative Media majors like her. 
“My goal was to finish this video and have it published before the end of this week, but this WiFi outage might push it back and cause a lot of other issues for myself and other students,” Huk said. 

Nathaly Ramirez Villata (junior, Criminal Justice) also lives on campus. She said she’s having to find ways to occupy her time without Internet access. But more importantly, she’s trying not to have anxiety about the uncertainty of when she’ll be able to submit assignments. 

“Since there is lack of communication with professors and other peers, it is really up in the air and stressful to know if deadlines will be changed and/or if in person classes will still be held depending on the professor,” she said.

Her parents, who live in the Bay Area, are also having a hard time communicating with her due to the outage. She said her text messages aren’t going through at all and has heard other friends are having the same issue.

“It has been greatly affecting different aspects of school, entertainment, and normal communication amongst us all and it is concerning how long it is taking for the issue to be fixed,” Ramirez Villata said.

As of Tuesday night, roughly five days in to the outages, only Office 365 was said to be up and running. While some other amenities had been restored, like the ability for campus eateries to accept credit cards again.
In an email Monday from OIT and the division of Business and Finance, the departments said they were working closely with the Chancellor’s Office and outside consultants had identified the issue and were working to restore services, however they did not say what that outside issue was.
The system failure has left faculty scrambling to not only figure out how to teach without the Internet or access to Canvas and other teaching tools, but how to communicate with students as to whether or not they would even be holding class, since Canvas is the main way faculty is able to contact students.
That was the biggest issue for political science professor, Dr. Dave Colnic, who said faculty wasn’t hearing much on the matter. 
“I’m hearing from a lot of faculty who are finding this to be a significant disruption and they don’t know how they’re going to keep their classes going and on schedule,” he said. “A lot of folks were really upset.” 
He added that he had heard the university was trying to provide hotspots to faculty, but wasn’t sure how that was going. He was able to use a hotspot he already had access to in order to conduct a planned lecture for his Monday night Media & Politics class, but he struggled leading up to the class to be able to communicate with his students prior to the class meeting time at 6:15 p.m. While a couple of students had emailed him prior to class to check in, he said there was no other way to reach out to the one’s who didn’t email him. 
“The biggest worry was that I couldn’t communicate,” Colnic said. “Students wanted answers, and I wanted to provide them, but I had no way of contacting my students.” 
As of Tuesday evening, Canvas was still down for many and those attempting to log in to My Stan State were met with “502 Bad Gateway” error messages.

Currently, most offices in the Mary Stuart Rogers building are closed and staff is working remotely. The Signal visited various OIT offices on campus Tuesday afternoon in an attempt to get a comment and also left voice mail messages, but had not heard back as of publication.

UPDATE: Feb. 23 12:30 p.m. An email that went out on Feb. 23 said that systems were close to being restored.

“On Feb. 16, unusual activity was detected on our campus network,” the email read. “Out of an abundance of caution, the Office of Information Technology isolated and shut down the campus network, halting incoming and outgoing network activity to investigate and discern the cause of the incident.”

The email went on to explain that the first step in the process of restoring the system, will be to is to have all faculty, staff and students reboot their on-campus computers and reset their Warrior password. 

In addition to the census date being extended to Feb. 28, tuition fees and scholarship applications have also been extended.    
This is a developing story and will be updated as news breaks.