Two unplanned outages have stopped ISU students from using Blackboard on two subsequent Sunday evenings.

On March 31, at 8:50 p.m., Blackboard went offline for all users. Similarly, an outage was reported April 5, near midnight.

The outages that users experienced during these times were not from Blackboard itself, but derived from an internal issue at ISU Information Technology offices. IT hosts its own Blackboard system on campus, allowing them greater control over the service.

Jim Twetten, director of academic technologies at ISU’s Information Technology Services, said that IT is aware of student frustration with these outages.

“We share the frustration with students, and apologize for the inconvenience. During any outage, multiple ITS staff members are working feverishly to correct the problem, because we know users are being negatively impacted,” Twetten said.

In most cases, Blackboard can be restarted and back online in a few minutes. Maintenance, or planned outages, occur on Saturday mornings and generally last about 30 minutes. When an unplanned outage happens, a team of system administrators and experts come together to discuss the issue and improve the Blackboard systems.

Last Sunday’s outage was a result of a problem that required careful insurance that no data would be lost. Director Twetten said that after the system had been returned to normal early Monday morning, staff worked for several more hours analyzing the issue and making adjustments.

IT Services stated that Blackboard has been up and running for 99.361% of the semester.

IT encourages anybody experiencing problems to contact the Solution Center at 294-4000 or at [email protected].