Major Campus Network Fiber Cut Thursday 8/31

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 16:21:59 -0400

Yesterday morning around 11am the campus suffered a cut to its main fiber optic cable feed that provides Internet connectivity to the campus. The cable was damaged by construction crews located a few miles outside of campus working on a nearby roadway where the cable was buried. Despite the abrupt loss of service to both the main Internet and the national high speed research and education network, all network services failed over automatically to our backup connections.

Everyone may have noticed a 30 second blip in service as all of the connections automatically failed over.

I wanted to thank the network team for their work having built such a resilient network over the years as well as their work throughout the day yesterday identifying the cause of the issue, pinpointing the exact location of the damage and working with crews to expedite the repairs. Our fiber was repaired around 1am and everything was switched back to our primary links.

If anyone has questions about the outage, the campus internet connections, or anything else related to this, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Damian Doyle

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Deputy CIO

Division of Information Technology

damian@umbc.edu