Nonetheless, it caused significant inconvenience, as a tour of several inner city university buildings shows on Wednesday afternoon. “We can't do anything for a while”, sighs the receptionist at the Faculty of Law on Bouillonstraat. “And we're hard to reach by phone: we get calls, but people can't hear us.”
Just a little further away, a student is bent over her law books, old-school pen and paper at hand. “We just had a group review of an exam, but Test Vision [exam software] was down. Even with phone hotspots, we couldn’t access it. That was kind of a bummer.” With a glance at her books, “I am now preparing a meeting. Fortunately, I had already done a lot for that.” A fellow student is less lucky: he can’t connect his laptop to his home computer where his documents are stored. “So I'll just go back and work there.”
"I really rely on UM-WiFi"
Meanwhile, students are leaving the Student Service Center at Ezelmarkt. Inside, it is quieter than usual, students are waiting in front of closed laptops or busy on their phones. Some don’t even notice the outage: “I'm actually always on my mobile hotspot”, one says. But not everyone has such easy access to an alternative connection. “I really rely on UM-WiFi,” said a student in the university library. “My phone can't share a hotspot; at home I barely have usable Internet.” Fortunately, deadlines are few and far between: those are still a few weeks away for most UM students. “It’s fine for a day, but in the long term, I will need WiFi for my research.”
"What can I still do? Clean up!"
The hallways of the School of Business and Economics at Tongersestraat are quiet. What can associate professor Diogo Sampaio Lima still do without the Internet? “Not that much”, he says resignedly. “I was revising a course in Canvas, this outage slows down the work.” Instead, he turns to grading the stack of exams lying on his desk - that can be done offline, too: “I happened to have printed the answers.” Management assistant Elke Lucas also plunges into the paper in her room: “What can I still do? Clean up!” Professor Stefan Straetmans, chair of SBE's Board of Examiners, is forced to postpone a case appeal hearing, which was supposed to take place via Zoom. “It really shows how dependent we’ve become.”
New attempts
Although most of the problems appear to have been resolved Wednesday afternoon, Surf, the joint ict organization for education, is again seeing attempts Thursday morning to take down the network “in the south of the country,” its spokesman tells the Higher Education Press Agency. The Internet at Fontys University of Applied Sciences was also disrupted Thursday.
Friday morning - 17 January - there are problems again. Surf declares there was a massive DDos-attack around 8:20h.
UM reports on its website that several services are unavailable or poorly available, including Wi-Fi, VPN and the wired Internet.
Peter Doorakkers and Lena Reichel