Web shuts down

By Troy Daughtery

Most students probably noticed that the Internet was down for several hours on Feb.10, causing problems turning in assignments on time and checking Facebook every six seconds.
It was down for much of the day, but eventually it came back up. So what caused the outage?
That was exactly what some of the technical staff was wondering as well.
They found out at about 7:30 a.m. that it was down, while many of them were still on their way to the campus.

“Once we arrived, we quickly realized that it was a problem with our Internet provider, Zayo Group’s side, and not ours,” said John Hawkinson, assistant director of infrastructure.
After the college found out that it was a problem on the Web provider’s side, they got in contact with them to try and figure it out.
They simply began explaining to Zayo Group what they were seeing on the college’s end of things and telling them what parts of the Internet were not working correctly.
After lengthy discussions, they eventually figured out that HCC’s outgoing signal was having problems communicating with one of Zayo Group’s routers in Wichita.
They believe that there was some type of bug with the router in Wichita that caused it to be unable to send and receive signals from HCC.
“To fix this issue, Zayo swung the Internet traffic from the college up to Kansas City instead of going through Wichita,” Hawkinson said.
He explained that usually our Internet traffic goes to Wichita and then up to Kansas City, so to fix the problem they simply bypassed Wichita.
For now, the Wichita router still could have a bug, so HCC is still going directly to Kansas City, but once the router is working properly again they may shift it back to Wichita.
This is ultimately what led to students being unable to repost cat pictures for so long.
They had to figure out what the problem was and then move the traffic from Wichita to Kansas City, which inevitably took some time.

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