A cut fiber optics cable is to blame for the 18-hour shutdown of University of Toronto Scarborough’s internal network on February 24. The outage spanned from 2 am Friday morning to 8 pm that evening.

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I was unable to answer emails and [check the voicemail], which is a large part of my job. Students were very unhappy with us at the SCSU for not being able to book them [for meetings] earlier, or at all.

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The cable links the UTSC network to the St. George Campus network downtown. With St. George as the primary internet service provider (ISP), both UTSC and UTM’s networks must go through St. George to have access to their internet. The severing of the cable broke that connection, causing the outage.

The network outage only impacted those working on the UTSC network at the school. Though it was reading week, and many students were unaffected, those students who were on campus found the outage an irritation.

Gillian Worton-Scott, Scarborough Campus Students’ Union’s (SCSU) administrative assistant, worked the day of the outage and said that the outage affected her job.

“I was unable to answer emails and [check the voicemail], which is a large part of my job,” Worton-Scott said. “Students were very unhappy with us at the SCSU for not being able to book them [for meetings] earlier, or at all.”

Zoran Piljevic, director of IT at UTSC, said that the university has been aware of the risk of outages for some time. According to him, a new initiative called Network Access Redundancy Project, which will prevent further shutdowns, is already in motion.

“It’s unfortunate that we had this cut before we had the chance to implement [it],” Piljevic said. “This was a very visible reminder of why this is important.”

The Network Access Redundancy Project plans to wire a direct cable from UTSC’s instructional centre to nearby Centennial College to establish a backup network. If the primary connection between UTSC and St. George is interrupted, the network traffic will flow through the secondary connection with Centennial until the primary connection is restored.

Piljevic said the secondary connection is currently expected to be established between the end of spring and the beginning of summer this year.