Campus-wide WiFi outage wreaks havoc among students

Alex Bazeley, News Editor

NYU WiFi went down across campus for approximately three hours on Monday night, sparking widespread complaints from students upset that the outage would impede their ability to watch Netflix – or do actual schoolwork. The network experienced disruptions throughout Monday night and into yesterday morning, with access intermittently coming in and out until about 11 p.m. on Tuesday.

In a press release on Tuesday afternoon, the university attributed these network issues to a Distributed Denial of Service attack, in which foreign traffic from multiple locations overloaded a particular server for a temporary period of time, essentially denying access to those attempting to access the server for legitimate reasons.

“Denial of Service attacks do occur with some frequency on the Internet in order to temporarily shut down a website or institution, and it is often unknown who is responsible,” the press release reads. “We are working with a vendor who provides mitigation services to prevent this from happening in the future, and to recover more quickly if it should.”

In the press release, the university maintained that no data had been compromised.

At around 6 p.m. on Monday, students and faculty found themselves unable to access the Internet. This obviously did not sit well with students, many of whom took to Twitter to voice their displeasure.

The reactions ranged from the surprisingly polite…

…to the not-surprisingly less polite.

About two hours into the outage, NYU updated its student body by stating what was all too obvious at that point.

Unfortunately, many students were having none of it – despite the fact that they couldn’t exactly decide on how much they were paying to go to the school.

Some had rational reactions…

…while others had simply had enough.

The university did its best to keep order among a frustrated student body, sending out mutliple tweets trying to ressaure everyone that IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY, SERIOUSLY.

Looks like some students just couldn’t handle it.

As of approximately 11 a.m. on Tuesday, NYU IT services had announced that everything was up and running smoothly again – much to the chagrin of the students relying on it as an excuse for that unwritten essay.

In the end, Twitter user @Jakesdebb seemed to sum up the night’s events best:

Email Alex Bazeley at [email protected].