Hilbert College experienced a series of internet outages last month, making it difficult for students to access blackboard, email services, self-service and the internet in general for those who live on campus.

This had impacted many students and faculty as it caused many lesson plans and classes to be changed and postponed. Many classes had to come to a standstill or be canceled since nothing was accessible, frustrating some students and faculty.

“This outage made this time a lot more difficult to communicate with any professors or just simply turning in any work,” Angelo DiNizo, a Hilbert student and member of the baseball team, said. “Because I practice six days a week with games in between and it doesn’t give me a huge time window to complete work if I can’t access to internet on my off time.”

Getting assignments turned in became difficult with Blackboard down and slowed grading as professors were not able to enter them into the system. With this, many students and faculty went to email to get the message out to one another about late assignments. However, it turned out that the email servers were down as well.

Those living on campus were also without internet access for a period of time as well. It caused many students to miss zoom meetings and classes. Zoom has become an important part of the classroom for many classes and having this happen proved to be a problem.

The Hilbert College IT department has been working hard to resolve this issue and have created many work arounds and solutions.

Jonathon Heck, a student employee in the IT department, said things have been running smooth again since the department addressed the issues.

“Essentially the core server that had the email and all other services on it failed,” Heck said. “It caused a chain reaction causing everything to crash.”

The importance of the internet has taken over the academic world as most lecture material and assignment are saved on the cloud servers. When these server outages take place, it can be detrimental.