The past two Blackboard outages, last Saturday and Monday, were both due to storage issues with the online, school-wide service. ITS has been working to fix the issues, and, according to Thomas Phillips, academic and business services generalist for Hillsdale College, they “will not recur.”
Phillips explained that the collapse of the servers for the most recent two outages were for the storage issue, and the ITS said it is confident that it won’t need to address them again. The scheduled outages, occurring much more frequently, are due to updates to the server, which are regular maintenance issues.
“Although it has certainly been cold at times, the weather has not been a factor in system performance,” Phillips said about the most recent Blackboard outage, which occurred the day following the heavy snowfall.
ITS is working to ensure that the majority of Blackboard shutdowns are on days where students are not likely to be on the website, allowing the most widespread access possible. While it’s impossible to predict when unscheduled shutdowns should occur, ITS is trying to fix the bugs, effectively stopping them from happening, making Blackboard easier to use for students.
