The second day of classes is welcomed with a significant number of reported Wi-Fi outages throughout student residence halls, according to Cal Poly Information Technology Services’.
“It is a hardware issue they have been working on since the morning,” ITS told Mustang News. “They are doing everything they can … they only move forwards, not backwards.”
The cause of the outage is not known at this time, but outages in general are usually triggered by spikes in usage, such as when a mass amount of students return from a school break and begin to log into Wi-Fi all at once, according to Matt Weber, the Director of Client Services and Portfolio Management and in partnership with ITS.
Cal Poly instructors are allowed to make 25% of a class virtual for COVID-19 safety precautions, according to the Academic Senate’s policy. Many have already chosen to use that virtual time for students’ first week back on campus.
The Wi-Fi outage did not affect everyone in a specific residence hall, so if you are experiencing Wi-Fi outages, ITS encourages students to move to the library or another designated spot that has a reduced number of students.
The first reported Wi-Fi outage happened last night in the South Mountain Red Brick area while the number continued to increase into today. This includes halls such as other Red Bricks, North Mountain, Sierra Madre and PCV, according to ITS.
“If we see a small number of students reporting issues, it speaks completely differently than when a larger group is experiencing problems and becomes an issue we need to respond to,” Weber said. “Students should not hesitate to reach out if they are experiencing any technical issues.”
The issue is mostly resolved now, and will be monitored over the next couple of days, according to Weber.