All Internet connections in campus residence halls timed out Monday night due to a traffic overload of unknown origin, according to Computing and Information Services officials.
Traffic on the CPU that acts as the University's Internet firewall peaked at 7:33 p.m. on Monday, causing all dormitory networks to operate at a much slower rate. Actions requiring Internet connections were processed so slowly that Internet browsers and file sharing programs timed out, effectively disabling Internet access.
The connection was restored at 8:08 p.m., but CIS officials said they have not yet identified the source of the problem.
Student use was not the cause of the overload, said Tim Thorp, manager of training and communications at CIS. He said possibilities include spam, hackers or a virus.
"Our network has the capacity to handle way more traffic than we can produce as people," Thorp said, adding that the incident is "under investigation."
Junghyun Kim '10 was using MSN Messenger to chat with his mother in South Korea at the time of the overload.
"Suddenly, the text was transferring really slowly," he said. "I was completely logged out within seconds."
Kim placed a call to the CIS Help Desk to report the Internet failure, but when he was connected to an automated message about the network's status, he got a surprising response: "All mainframe and network services are stable."
Thorp said the Help Desk might not have been notified at the time of Kim's call or may have decided not to update the message since the downtime was so short.
Such incidents are rare, Thorp said, noting that Internet outages have been occurring less frequently over recent months than they have in the past.
