Simpson students experienced internet and campus services outages this Sunday and Monday morning.

“Our internet router has failed,” Lynne Jensen, director of information technology services at Simpson College, said in an email. “We are working with our support team but have no estimate for when it will be repaired yet. This impacts authentication for Moodle and many systems. Wifi on campus is up but cannot connect to anything external.”

This left students and faculty in a holding state to prepare for upcoming classes on Monday with no estimation of when the fixes would be complete.

Originally, the estimation by the vendor who provides help desk information for the router informed the IT department it would need to order a new device for the router to remedy the issue. This component was not going to be available until Tuesday at the earliest.

“It just took finding the right people to help solve the problem,” said Jensen.

Jensen contacted another company that also provides services and IT assistance to Simpson. That company was able to provide other information on fixing the problem. This did not require the extra component as originally estimated. Simpson was back online with full access by Monday around noon.

Jensen elaborated on the issue of internet services working properly, however, the outside connection to other sources was not able to pass through our internet router to have campus-wide access.

“Just last May we moved all of the Moodle data to the cloud,” Jensen said.

This meant the information needed to pass through the router point to have access. The exception was for some individuals who had signed into Moodle on a mobile device able to temporarily save the data for quick access.

“I’ve received great supportive emails, even from faculty, that said students actually went outside and played tag and other things they wouldn’t have normally done when they can stream and be on their phones,” Jensen said.

Simpson College is back online and the issue has been resolved.