Outage lasts for 2 hours

By Elliot Njus

Published April 18, 2008

A network outage took MU off the digital map for about two hours Tuesday evening.

The outage was caused by a failed hard drive, Information Technology Director Terry Robb said.

“It was just a simple hardware issue,” he said.

An intermittent outage started around 9 p.m., but the entire network went offline at about 10:20 p.m. The outage left campus without Internet access and made MU Web sites inaccessible, including themaneater.com and the Web sites for the Columbia Missourian and KOMU/Channel 8, which are both owned by the university.

The university called an expert to campus during the outage to diagnose and fix the problem, MU spokesman Christian Basi said. The network was working again by 10:50 p.m.

Robb said the Division of Information Technology would be working on the network early Sunday morning. He said the maintenance might cause another short outage, but only during the hours when the network’s traffic is lowest.

“We only do maintenance early Sunday morning,” he said.

He said the maintenance would help prevent future outages.

“The network’s pretty complex, and we’ve only had two outages in the past year,” Robb said. “And those were much shorter.”