This fall semester there have been three separate cases of network or internet failures across campus. The university’s Information Technology (IT) team sent out mass emails detailing the issues and were able to solve all the problems within the same day.

Dr. Tim Wilson, director of the IT department, said his team is working to prevent future problems.

“The last outage was caused by a non-standard piece of network equipment being plugged in,” Wilson said. “This particular piece of equipment went bad and caused a flood of corrupt network traffic.”

Wilson mentioned that the most recent network issue was not similar to past problems and most issues were unique.

“We are currently redesigning our network to better handle situations like this,” Wilson said.

However, some students expressed frustration with the amount of problems they had faced during the semester.

Abby Pietrzyk, a sophomore sports, arts and entertainment management (SAEM) major, said she uses her laptop to keep track of her classes, but the network outage forced her to finish her assignment on another day.

“I wasn’t able to access any of my projects that day because the Wi-Fi was down. I couldn’t log in, and I couldn’t do anything,” Pietrzyk said. “For one of the exercises for class, I had to completely redo it.”

Pietrzyk said she thought the IT department should look into the problems because she felt they had occurred too many times in one semester.

“The tech team is here for a reason, and I think because this has happened a lot, it is an extensive issue that they definitely need to take into account,” Pietrzyk said. “They need to listen to students and figure something out because we all rely on the internet for projects and everything like that.”

Megan Benfer, a sophomore creative writing major, has no access to internet in her room and was told by IT that there was nothing the department could do. Therefore, she relies on the school Wi-Fi to work outside of her room in order to finish her assignments on time.

“I do most of my homework at work because that is where the Wi-Fi works best,” Benfer said. “I can’t get my work done anywhere if the network isn’t working for the entire school.”

Despite her struggles, Benfer still acknowledged that the IT team worked hard to make sure everyone was taken care of.

“I think most of it isn’t the team’s fault at all,” Benfer said. “Internet is finicky, and it’ll do whatever it wants.”

Benfer also said that she appreciated the communication with students and said, if anything, the IT department could try to be more prompt with their announcements.

“The other day they were like ‘yeah, all the printers are not going to work from like this time to this time’ and even though it was going to be really inconvenient, at least they let me know,” Benfer said. “I think they are doing the best they can.”

In the future, Wilson said he had plans to sit down with The Globe and go in depth about the problems faced by IT. He encouraged students to go to the Help Desk in Thayer Hall if they were experiencing any difficulties.