In the wake of Spring registration for the 2019-20 academic year, Longwood University's email and file sharing systems had a failure, according to Mark Kendrick, associate vice president of information technology services.
“One of the engineers noticed the issue happening…but he was working on the problem,” Kendrick said. “They got the offsite vendor involved Monday around eight p.m. and they worked probably until four a.m.”
Per Kendrick, the engineer who initially noticed the issue on March 18 was internal to Longwood. He said no reports were received from students about the issue at the time, possibly because of the email issue itself. After the engineer noticed the issue, both Longwood staff and outside vendors worked to solve it.
According to Kim Redford, director of user support services, the system failure was unprecedented at Longwood both in scale and duration.
“(It’s the) First time that we'd had email down for anything or like that amount of time in 20 years,” Redford said.
Per Redford, there have been smaller gaps in service as well as scheduled maintenance, but not for as long as the system experienced from March 18 to March 20.
The faculty and staff "@longwood.edu" emails and the file sharing system was affected, according to Kendrick. Emails that end with "@longwood.edu" are hosted by Longwood and were affected by the system failure. Student emails, typically ending with "@live.longwood.edu", were not impacted as they are hosted by Microsoft. Additionally, the file sharing system was offline.
According to Kendrick, no data was lost from the system failure.
Redford said she had seen one social media post about lost data but had received no official reports about lost data.
Per Kendrick, students were notified the morning of March 19 via email that the "@longwood.edu" emails were offline.
According to Longwood's website, registration for Fall 2019 classes started on March 19. Per Redford, they were in contact with the registrar during the incident.
“We were talking with them that morning, that Tuesday morning at six a.m.,” Redford said. “I was in conversation with the registrar and shortly after that first thing that morning is when the first communication went out to students to let them know that the @longwood.edu (emails), including offices were not working.”
Per Redford, the incident did not negatively impact registration.
“In terms of the actual registration process, nothing (went wrong),” Redford said. “Everything went smoothly. We worked every day of registration with the registration office.”
Email and file sharing system issues were resolved on March 20 at approximately 8:53 p.m. per an email from Redford sent out to all students.
Redford said technology and user support services are planning to be more prepared in case it happens again and will continue to meet about preventing a similar situation, but no specific additional safeguard has been planned and implemented yet.
