Students were unable to access Tufts' Student Information System (SIS) to look at the status of courses and to register from Monday night through early Tuesday morning.
This malfunction caused many problems for students, especially sophomores, whose registration times for the spring semester spanned from Monday afternoon to Tuesday.
The system was fixed by Tuesday morning, although some students had to register later than their 8 a.m. assigned block.
According to Manager of Internet Technology Training Dawn Irish, the problem stemmed from the program's vendor.
"Although we renewed the license in a timely fashion, and everything initially worked as expected, changes that the vendor made to the information necessary to operate the software were not conveyed to [University Internet Technology] by the vendor, which caused today's down time," Irish told the Daily yesterday.
This proved particularly problematic for students who were unable to check the status of classes on Monday night to see which ones were still available before they had to register on Tuesday.
"The only time you could get on [to SIS] was when you had to pick [classes]," sophomore Jason Safer said. "You couldn't do research."
Irish apologized for any inconveniences that the episode caused. "In terms of the inconvenience to the students, we are very sorry," she said.
"We take the registration process very seriously and this is only the second disruption we've had to online registration in the past six years," Irish said. "The first one was due to a campus power outage."
- Sarah Butrymowicz and Rob Silverblatt
