A digger caused large disruption when it broke through a fibre cable – tearing down the university IT network.
Engineers were drafted in to fix the fault yesterday afternoon, but Janet UK, the education network which supplies York with its connection, said that all should still be considered “at risk” while work continues. Telephone connections were also affected, according to the university’s telephone service.
A snap of the unique incident was uploaded to Twitter by KC Business, the IT service provider, which said: “This picture shows the reason we are having some network issues today. A JCB has gone through some fibre cabling.”
This picture shows the reason we are having some network issues today. A JCB has gone through some fibre cabling pic.twitter.com/csw2wOkiuw
— KC Business (@KC_Business) October 7, 2014
Students took to social media during the incident to complain about the service going down.
One wrote: “No internet access in exhibition centre electronics! Any suggestions” (sic)
Another said: “@UoYITServices we’ve lost our connection in Careers :(”
All universities in the Yorkshire region were affected by the outage including York St John, Leeds and Leeds Beckett.
City of York councillors were also unavailable electronically as the website, telephone and email facilities went down.
A spokesperson for Janet UK said: “KCOM is working on fibre repairs. Only two sites remain down but all sites should still be considered at risk while work continues.”
As Communications and Marketing Manager for IT Services, I’d like to thank both staff and students for their patience and good humour in dealing with this outage. And we’re also very grateful to the 3G network (albeit patchy) for allowing us to keep people updated via https://twitter.com/UoYITServices