Officials hope Blackboard’s “blackouts” will end soon following the program’s recent patchy service.
In the past ten days, Blackboard 9 has been down three times, citing the same problem at least twice. The first outage occurred on Feb. 20, when Blackboard encountered database problems and caused the site to be down for about four hours, said Sean O’Malley, communications manager for the Office of Information Technology.
It was the first downtime the site has experienced since the current version was uploaded last fall, O’Malley said.
The next outage was Friday when a behind-the-scenes problem caused the disk storage system to down the site for several minutes about four times periodically throughout the day. Not only was Blackboard down, but other systems were affected as well, O’Malley said.
The third and last outage occurred yesterday morning around 10 a.m. when the site went down, came back up, went down again and finally came up again at about 1 p.m. O’Malley cited the same disk storage system, or disk array, as the possible reason for the outage, though it hasn’t been confirmed yet.
“We’ve had an unfortunate coincidence of two issues,” O’Malley said, adding that they are not aware of yesterday’s severe weather having an effect on the system.
Although this is only the third time Blackboard has been down, OU students noted other problems they have had with the site. Taylor Newton, a freshman studying marketing, said she has had trouble logging in before and added that her roommate has had problems opening files.
“Some problems are partly the professors because some don’t know how to use it,” Newton said. “Some problems are the system, which was my issue.”
Other students cite speed as a problem. Cayce Clifford, a junior studying photojournalism, said Blackboard can be slow for off-campus users.
O’Malley said this is the first major problem OIT has had with the disk array, and since other networks use the storage system, they are “focusing their attention on it.”
“The (disk array) is like the hard disk drive in a personal computer. It stores things for other systems, so this can be pretty common for large systems,” he added. “It works independently of Blackboard … it’s not Blackboard’s fault in this case.”
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