IT issues over the bank holiday weekend

There were a few IT related issues

Network Drives: Stopped working. This has been resolved this morning, and everything should be working fine. Please contact Service Desk if you are still having any problems.

Blackboard: An overnight update caused some issues. The problem has been identified and the solution is in progress. Users and enrolments should be re-enabled within the next hour.

The IT status page (https://itsstatus.reading.ac.uk/) will be kept up to date with any news.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Change to how you login to Office 365

As part of improving digital security IT are making a minor change to the login process to Office 365.  You will now enter your username and password on a Microsoft branded login page, instead of a University of Reading branded one.

What is changing?

Old method for logging in to Office 365:

  1. Enter username on Microsoft branded login page
  2. Enter password on University of Reading branded login page

New method for logging in to Office 365:

  1. Enter username on Microsoft branded login page
  2. Enter password on Microsoft branded page.

The only thing changing is where you enter your password. Before, you entered your username into a Microsoft branded login page which then redirected you to a University of Reading branded login page where you would enter your password. Now, you will enter your username the same way as before but will be redirected to a similarly branded Microsoft (including a UoR logo) login page where you will enter your password.

Have a question or need help?

If you need help regarding passwords, usernames or logging into Office 365, then please do not hesitate in contacting the IT Service Desk at reading.ac.uk/it or by calling ext 6262.

Interruption to Student Email Service

This has now been resolved for all students.


We are happy to confirm that on Friday (02/08/19) evening we were able to fix the issue affecting the student e-mail service. There appears to be an issue with UoR Malaysia students experiencing a similar difficulty which we are currently investigating.

Please be aware that any messages that were bounced back will need to be resent.

We will be having a meeting on Wednesday 7th review the incident.


We are currently experiencing an interruption to our student email service.

E-mails sent to affected student accounts will bounce back to the sender, and will need to be re-sent once service has been restored.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused – we are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Our status page has been updated, and will be kept up to date with progress.

New look for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft has released a new viewing option for Teams which turns the Teams section from a list of your teams to a tiled view.

Some more information can be found here.

From within the tile you can then manage the team as you would have in the list view.

When you next log in to Teams, you should see this screen:

If you want to move back to the list view that you are used to, the option to do so is in the top right, next to the ‘Join or create team’ button.