Internet Outages Hit Much of CU Sunday

Internet users experienced spotty connections across Columbia networks Sunday evening.

At approximately 6 p.m. outages spread across campus, hitting dorms as well as several University libraries.

“It keeps on connecting and reconnecting. It’s a pain in the ass,” Amital Isaac, GS/JTS, said. “I am about to start my University Writing research paper and I have 21 sites that I need to visit.”

“It’s terrible. It sucks,” said Max Tierman, CC ’10. “I was forced to leave Avery library while working on an econ assignment because I lost my internet connection.”

CUIT officials said that by 7 p.m. technicians had investigated and resolved the issue.

“I’ve been [in Butler] since seven and the connection has been working fine,” Jessica Garcia, CC ’09, said.

According to a CUIT official, “We just had an outage and stuff like this happens ... ethernet was there but there was some kind of problem—for example when you type google.com, the address was not resolved, but when you typed the IP address, the address came up.”

The officials said that the difficulties were caused by a problem with the domain name system, which translates domain names into IP addresses.

“I was e-mailing my professor back and forth while working on my paper and it was absolutely annoying,” Jeremy Constancio, CC ’10, said. “I wish that Columbia put more effort into making the connection much more efficient and reliable.”

Some students said they felt that Sunday’s outage was not an isolated incident on campus. Michael Cloney, CC ’10, commented: “My internet connection doesn’t work a vast majority of the time. I had problems today, but I have problems almost every day.”