Power outage affects Purdue’s IT systems from Saturday night to Sunday

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A power outage on Purdue's West Lafayette campus Saturday night lasted long enough to knock out Purdue’s information technology systems, interrupting the campus wired and wireless networks, as well as email and other services that rely on them.

Phones and voicemail also were affected in some cases, including at ITaP’s Customer Service Center.

The power outage happened around 8:45 p.m. Saturday (March 24). The University lost a feed from a Duke Energy transmission line to campus. As a result, Purdue's Wade Power Plant and campus had a loss of power.

Duke and Purdue crews responded and restored power to campus again Saturday night. Power was out long enough, however, to interrupt campus IT systems and services. This affected most systems that require logging in, including Blackboard Learn, the wired and wireless networks, email, computer labs and business and retail systems, among others.

Blackboard was unavailable to students and faculty from 8:45 p.m. Saturday until around 4:30 p.m. Sunday.

As soon as ITaP was notified of the power outage, ITaP crews were deployed Saturday evening to begin assessing and restoring services. There may be some intermittent service interruptions while technicians continue to restore things fully.

The abnormally long power outage created service disruptions, from which it has taken much longer than normal to recover. In particular, the power outage affected network switches and firewalls, components central to the operation of Purdue’s data centers. This lengthened the time it took to bring systems back online, in part by impairing the ability to authenticate through the firewalls, a necessary security procedure.

Once the systems come back online, it also is necessary to review and validate them to make sure they were running properly.