On Wednesday, September 28, 2016 at 3:25 PM CCS received reports about slow or intermittent internet access. Network services team is investigating the issue.
Update:
The network services team tuned some traffic threshold parameters and services resumed at 4:00 PM
Update October 3, 2016:
The Internet outage on September 28, 2016 was the result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The attack was first reported at approximately 3:14 PM. DDoS network traffic is designed to stress networks and servers to the point that they become unavailable. In response, CCS began to aggressively filter network traffic until Internet access from inside Ryerson was restored and the DDoS attack subsided.
During the initial stage of the attack people attempting to access the Internet from on campus were not able to do so or found access extremely slow. However, anyone off campus was still able to connect to Ryerson’s core services such as the my.ryerson.ca portal.
By 3:37 PM, when Ryerson began aggressively filtering network traffic, a small number of people were no longer able to access Ryerson from off campus. At the same time network access from on campus was restored.
As a safety precaution, a moderately aggressive level of filtering was left on overnight. This caused connection issues for a relatively small number of people trying to connect to Ryerson during the morning of Thursday September 29 until approximately 10 AM when filtering was adjusted back to normal levels.
CCS is analysing the attack and our response to it and will work to improve our response to DDoS attacks in the future.
-Computing and Communications Services