Brightspace by D2L service interruption – Friday, October 9, 2015

D2L has confirmed that Brightspace, Ryerson’s learning management system was unavailable on Friday October 9, 2015 from 6PM to 6:15PM.

The issue was caused by problems with the D2L’s Web server farm.

We are following up with D2L to get more information on the root cause and to check that the problem did not occur earlier as we have at least one report of a problem at approximately 5 PM.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that was caused by this outage.

– Computing and Communications Services

 

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Soapbox unavailable in the my.ryerson.ca portal Oct. 11, 2015

The Soapbox ideas sharing application is temporarily unavailable from within the my.ryerson.ca portal. The problem seems to be with Soapbox’s servers not properly authenticating Ryerson community members.

Update – 8:45 AM, October 14 – Soapbox has fixed the issue and the service resumed at 10:30 PM, October 13

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Internet outage on Friday, October 9, 2015 at 11 PM

On Saturday, October 10, 2015 at 12:45 AM, a major network device failed and prevented access to the Internet. A temporary work around has been put in place at 4:30 AM. However, Wireless users, and general purpose lab computers still don’t have Internet access. Network services team is investigating the problem.

Update at 8:00 AM October 10:

The issue with the network device has been fixed by its vendor and services resumed at 7:55 AM

Update at 10:00 AM October 10:

The issue with the network device has re-occurred at 9:15 AM and the vendor is re-engaged. No Internet access is available

Update at 4:00 PM October 10:

Access to many services were restored in the early afternoon however additional outages are possible before this issue is fully resolved.

Update at 4:45 PM October 11:

Since approximately 11PM on October 9, Ryerson’s network has been under attack. The cyber attack initially caused the failure of a set of devices that are an essential component of Ryerson’s network. The result was a complete loss of Internet connectivity. For a time people on campus could not access the Internet and people outside Ryerson could not access any of Ryerson’s locally hosted online services. Since then our network has been returned to service and CCS has been working with our Internet Service Providers and Network infrastructure vendors to better protect the network from the attack.

As an interim measure we also blocked most traffic originating from outside Canada from reaching Ryerson. This had the unfortunate effect of blocking students, faculty, and staff outside Canada from using Ryerson’s email and other online resources. It also delayed the delivery of email from around the world. Whenever possible we are now gradually relaxing international access restrictions.

While the attack appears to be targeting our network availability we are also looking for signs of other intrusions and for any attempts to compromise other systems.

CCS staff are now doing the painstaking work required to better understand the nature of the attack and further defend against it.  We will continue to post updates here as new information becomes available.

Update at 1:00 AM October 12:

Access to Ryerson from most of the world has been restored. We are still temporarily blocking some geographic areas.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience these outages have caused.

-Computing and Communications Services

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Google Drive, Sheets, Docs and Slides access problem: Friday Oct. 9, 2015 2:50 PM

This afternoon at approximately 2:50 PM CCS began receiving reports that people were having problems accessing Google Drive, Spreadsheets, Docs and Slides. Google is aware of the problem and is investigating:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

CCS will update this service alert when Google provides more information or resolves the problem. Google Mail and Calander services appear to be unaffected.

Update 7:10 PM, Oct. 9:  The Google Apps Dashboard indicates that the problem with Google Drive, Spreadsheets, Docs and  Slides should be resolved, as of 5:30 PM.

 

-Computing and Communications Services

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Scheduled my.ryerson system maintenance: Sunday, October 11, 2015 from 6:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.

The software that runs the my.ryerson, uPortal will be upgraded to a new version on Sunday, October 11, 2015  from 6:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. Access to the my.ryerson portal and all applications accessed through the my.ryerson portal may be intermittent during this time frame.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

-Computing and Communications Services

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WiFi authentication outage on Tuesday, October 6, 2015

On Tuesday, October 6, 2015 at 4:15 PM, the authentication system for wireless users failed. This prevented new wireless session from being established. Network services team is investigating the problem.

 

Update:

The problem was traced to an overload of authentication requests that exceeded a conservative threshold. The threshold has been increased to alleviate the problem and  services resumed at 6:45 PM

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

-Computing and Communications Services

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Brightspace by D2L – email delivery delay issue – October 5, 2015

CCS has received reports from users that emails sent from Brightspace by D2L were delayed. It appears that the emails are delayed for one hour within Brighspace, when using the built-in email tool through Classlist. This issue has been escalated to D2L and they are currently working on it. We will provide an update when we have more information.

We apologize for any inconvenience this have caused.

-Computing and Communications Services

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Brightspace by D2L service interruption -Thursday, October 1, 2015

Brightspace by D2L, Ryerson’s learning management system is currently unavailable. The issue was reported this afternoon at around 4:45 PM. We have contacted D2L and have opened a case with their support desk.

We will provide an update when more information is available.

Update at 5:23 PM – The following information was received from D2L:

To Our Valued D2L Clients,

Incident: The D2L Network Operations Center (NOC) advises that an infrastructure event may be impacting your site performance.

End User Impact: Users may be unable to, or may experience issues when accessing the Learning Environment.

Status: Our Infrastructure Teams are fully engaged and are working diligently to rectify the issue.

We sincerely apologize for the impact this disruption may cause your organization. We will follow up with further updates as they become available, or within the next hour.

Update at 5:50 PM – Service appears to have been restored at approximately 5:45 but we are testing to confirm it is working for everyone and to get D2L’s confirmation that the problem is fully resolved.

Update at 7:40 PM – D2L reports that the problem has not been fully resolved yet.

7:20PM ET – [Update] – Our Infrastructure teams have identified the issue and are working diligently to rectify. End users will be able to notice improvements in site performance shortly.

Update at 6:33 AM Oct 2 – D2L is reporting that the problem has been fully resolved:

9:00 PM ET – [Monitoring] –  The D2L Infrastructure teams have confirmed your sites are showing fully accessible and operational. All alerts have cleared and we are continuing to monitor closely.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

– Computing and Communications Services

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Internet outage for Wireless & lab computers on Thursday September 24, 2015

On Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 1:17 PM, a network device rebooted itself. This prevented all wireless devices and lab computers from accessing the Internet until the reboot was completed at 1:23 PM.

Update:

Same issue happened again on Friday, September 25, 2015 between 1:03 and 1:09 PM. A permanent bypass to this device has been made to avoid anymore outages.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

-Computing and Communications Services

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Brightspace By D2L email delivery delay issue: September 21 and 24, 2015

CCS has received reports from users that email sent from Brightspace by D2L were delayed. Our own test has shown that emails are delayed for one hour within Brighspace, when using the built-in email tool through Classlist. This issue has been escalated to D2L and they are currently working on it. We will provide an update when we have more information.

We apologize for any inconvenience this have caused.

Update – September 22, 2015 – D2L has reported that the issue has been fixed. Our own tests this morning indicate that emails are delivered promptly.

Update – Septenber 25, 2015 –  We received additional complaints of delays of up to 3 hours on September 24. We raised the issue with D2L who reported fixing it again. We have since escalated the issue to D2L again to ensure the fix is permanent.

– Computing and Communications Services

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