UPDATE 1:10 p.m.:
Cal Poly Information Technology Services restored the university network system at approximately 11:45 a.m. Thursday, according to university officials. This allowed students, professors and administrators access to their My Cal Poly Portal, as well as their Cal Poly email accounts and calendars.
Campus Wi-Fi, however, will not be restored until Thursday evening, according to Johanna Madjedi, associate vice provost for information technology services. By bringing Wi-Fi online, the university risks once again interrupting network services and taking the portal offline.
“The last thing we want to do is risk bringing the network offline again,” Madjedi said.
Madjedi said Wi-Fi should be available Thursday night, after peak usage hours end around 6 p.m.
Also affected by the outage was Cal Poly Corporation, which could not accept credit card transactions Thursday morning. Campus Dining customer service representative Kathleen Pennington said she was only aware of one register on campus located in The Avenue that could still not accept cards.
Plu$ Dollars, meal credits and Campus Express accounts were working properly during the outage, according to Pennington.
Original Post:
Cal Poly servers are back online Thursday morning, but network problems are still preventing access to some systems that help the campus function.
Internet on campus became accessible at approximately 10:10 a.m., less than one hour after university officials notified the campus community of the outage via the emergency text message and email system, PolyAlert.
But several other services are still unavailable, such as access to My Cal Poly Portal, university email and calendar services and Campus Dining transaction systems that allow for electronic payments at restaurants on campus.
Campus technicians are working “as hard as they can” Thursday morning to fix the problem, Cal Poly spokesperson Chip Visci said. There is no expected timeline for when all networks will be working normally, Visci said.
The outage began with a lightning strike at an off-campus PG&E electrical line at approximately 2:30 a.m. This caused a power surge at the Cal Poly campus, which stopped cooling units in the on-campus server room from working properly.
Differing levels of access throughout campus have been reportedly available throughout the morning. This post will be updated as more information becomes available.
Sean McMinn contributed to this report.