An outage of one of Tufts' Internet service providers hampered Internet access for students on the Medford/Somerville campus during the early hours of the morning yesterday. Students trying to access the Internet between 12:05 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. were met with error messages and disconnections, according to University Information Technology Director of Communications and Organizational Effectiveness Dawn Irish.
"Tufts has Internet service providers [ISP] that take information to and from our campus. One of those providers had an outage themselves, so we were affected by it," Irish said. "It was an intermittent outage."
The problem lay with RCNSidera, one of Tufts' ISPs, according to Irish.
"If you hit the RCN network, you would have a problem. The error was not on the side of the university," Irish said.
For students attempting to access sites on the Tufts network such as the Microsoft Exchange email platform or Trunk, such an outage was unnoticeable, Irish said.
"If a student was trying to go off the campus network, onto the worldwide Internet on public access fibers, they ran into the outage," Irish confirmed.
Some websites remained accessible, while others were not. Some students could not access Google but were able to load Bing, and while TuftsDaily.com was not available, TRCommons.org was, according to Irish.
"It's not about the website they were going to; it's about the ISP connection. It all depends on which ISP you ran into and how many times you tried to access a website," she said.
Irish insisted that the outage did not result in a data breach of the Tufts network, or compromise student information. "There was no security risk or breach for users," she said.
