Mustang Daily Staff Report
news@mustangdaily.net
Though lightning did not physically strike campus last week, a stray bolt did strike a chord at Cal Poly on Thursday when it hit an off-campus Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) line early that morning, prompting a campus-wide power surge. The surge temporarily stopped cooling units in the on-campus server room from working properly, which led to a network failure.
Due to the failure, Cal Poly students, faculty and staff temporarily could not access their Cal Poly portals, including emails and calendars, or campus Wi-Fi. Portal access was reestablished by 11:45 a.m. that day, but Wi-Fi was not accessible until later that evening.
“The last thing we want to do is risk bringing the network offline again,” Johanna Madjedi, associate vice provost for information technology services, said of the incident that day.
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 not accept cards following the system fix.
Plu$Dollars, meal credits and Campus Express accounts were all working properly during the outage, according to Pennington.
Sean McMinn contributed to this report.