itsnews We have had a series of issues over the last 24 hours and this is to explain some of the problems.
- Yesterday, we had a problem with one of the Exchange front end servers, starting around 2pm. This initially manifested with a problem accessing Public Folders and was affecting up to 400 Exchange users. We believe this was resolved by a server reboot at 4.30pm, as we saw a marked decline in calls and services were responding as we would expect.
- Yesterday evening, we had a similar incident to last week’s problems with our Virtual Server Hosting infrastructure which caused problems with:
- Blackboard
- OWAMail
- Smtp.reading.ac.uk
- Agresso
- Trent
- Blogs
- Website
This list is not exhaustive, but gives you an idea of the impact of the problem. Staff were working on the problem overnight and we restored services early this morning.
We have tested all the systems this morning and we are only seeing residual problems with email, which will resolve over the course of this morning.
I was pleased to see the ITS status pages had been updated to indicate this when I tried to log in to email this morning. The amber dot assured me it was not my system failing to do what I wanted.
I’m having issues accessing blackboard, has this issue actually been resolved?
Your its help email gave me a number to call, and the desk is closed. So what’s the point of giving me an urgent number that can’t be used in an urgent situation?
An update to what is going on with blackboard would be appreciated
Firstly we apologise for the outage, we had problems with a routine system restart during our standard maintenance window. Staff were working on this from 6pm until late last night to retrieve the service, but it is now fully functional again.
With regards to the comment about the Help email, we have requested that this be updated to include opening hours, as we do not offer an out of hours service. For information, telephone support is available from 8.30-1900 during term time and from 8.30-1800 during vacation.