An hours-long outage impacting Columbia University’s online platforms began around 7 a.m. on Tuesday this week. The New York Police Department is now working with the university to investigate the cause of the outage. The ongoing outage is impacting Columbia’s UNI authentication service, which students use to log into their accounts. This blocked access to LionMail and CourseWorks, where professors post assignments and readings for all of their students. Columbia University Information Technology urged affiliates to stay logged in to retain access to all of the online services. CUIT also wrote that faculty teaching summer classes should bring materials to present in class via a USB drive.
A University spokesperson wrote in a statement to Spectator that the University was aware of some online posts.
These posts were from a group claiming that it was responsible for causing this particular widespread campus outage. However, a university spokesperson wrote in a later statement that the online posts had been officially discredited. The University’s IT teams are investigating the situation alongside law enforcement and are working towards a quick solution. Sources told The New York Post that a low-level access control breach brought down Columbia’s systems early Tuesday. It was also confirmed that no clinical operations at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center have been impacted.
A separate University official wrote in a statement that several screens across campus were displaying completely unrelated images. The official added that the University is investigating the incident, but cannot definitively connect these screen incidents. At least one television screen at a dorm on the Morningside campus displayed a picture of President Donald Trump. An image of this specific television screen was obtained and then published by the Columbia Spectator student newspaper.
It was not immediately clear what online posts the spokesperson was referring to or what group was allegedly involved.
This recent incident follows a previous cyberattack against Columbia that was claimed by the hacktivist group Anonymous Arabia. That group’s dark web post taking credit claims that its cyberattack took down the university’s entire network. The current widespread outage also coincides with the recently announced departure of the university’s chief information officer. Gaspare LoDuca, CUIT’s vice president, will leave Columbia to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in August. During his long ten-year tenure at the University, LoDuca oversaw all of the information technology systems. He led the university’s IT department during the recent rollout of the new Vergil student registration website.
Reference:
