Campus Network Outage & Recovery: A Team Effort to Restore Service
March 18th Update: While service has been restored, Technology Solutions continues to investigate the root cause of the outage with our vendor engineers.
The UIC campus experienced a significant network disruption due to a hardware failure of our primary firewall on Thursday, March 6th at approximately 3:00PM. This failure, which persisted into the evening hours, left the campus without reliable network connectivity for several hours, impacting both administrative and academic operations. Thanks to the dedication of our network engineering team and careful contingency planning, the campus network was successfully restored until full recovery was achieved.
Incident Overview Heading link
The initial failure occurred when our primary campus firewall, a critical piece of infrastructure for managing and securing network traffic, experienced a hardware failure. Fortunately, we had a backup measure in place: an automatic failover system designed to activate should the primary firewall fail. However, this secondary system also experienced an unexpected failure, compounding the situation and preventing an immediate failover.
As a result, our small but dedicated network engineering team was forced to intervene manually. They worked tirelessly to diagnose the problem, identify the root cause, and implement a solution to restore connectivity. While the team’s efforts began to show results by around 1:00 AM on Friday, March 7, the network was still operating in a degraded state due to the lack of an automatic failover backup, which was critical for optimal performance.
Recovery & Interim Solutions Heading link
Once connectivity was restored, the network operated without full redundancy while the team awaited the arrival of replacement hardware. Throughout Friday and into the evening, our engineers continued to field smaller, residual outages, working efficiently to restore service wherever possible. This ongoing manual intervention ensured that the network was functional but still lacked the automatic redundancy that would typically safeguard against future disruptions.
The team’s agility in responding to the persistent issues prevented a prolonged disruption of campus operations. However, as a precautionary measure, full network redundancy could not be fully restored until the replacement hardware arrived.
Full Recovery: Monday Night Maintenance Heading link
On Monday, March 10, the replacement hardware for the failed firewall components arrived. To minimize disruption to the campus community, our network engineering team scheduled a maintenance window from 11:00 PM to 2:00 AM, when campus activity was at its lightest. This time frame was carefully chosen to avoid significant impact on evening classes and after-hours campus events.
During this maintenance window, the failed hardware was replaced and tested. By 11:30 PM, the hardware had been successfully swapped out, and the campus network was fully operational again. By 1:30 AM, the backup automatic failover system was also fully restored, re-establishing complete network redundancy and ensuring that the campus network could withstand future failures with minimal disruption.
A Grateful Acknowledgment of Our Network Engineering Team Heading link
We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to our network engineering team, who demonstrated exceptional professionalism and unwavering dedication throughout the entire outage and recovery process. A special thank you to Paul Neumann, Charles Nutall, Jessica Mason, Len Lee, Manny Gonzales, Bill Sullivan, Gerry Taylor, Bill Lim, James Howell, and Jesus Arista for their tireless efforts during this challenging time. Their expertise and persistence were critical in navigating the complexities of this outage and bringing our campus network back to full functionality.
Additionally, we are deeply thankful for the collaborative efforts of our local IT staff across the various units and colleges, whose contributions and troubleshooting support played an essential role in ensuring the swift recovery of services.
Looking Forward Heading link
As we continue to enhance our infrastructure and redundancy measures, we remain committed to improving the resilience of our campus network. The lessons learned from this incident will inform future planning, ensuring that we are better prepared to handle similar situations in the future. We greatly appreciate the patience and understanding of our campus community as we worked to resolve this issue and restore service.
We are proud of the way our team came together to handle this difficult situation and look forward to providing our campus with a more robust and reliable network experience moving forward.
– Jelene Crehan,