Following service interruptions and failures beginning on November 16, Creighton’s Division of Information Technology and Library Services, ITLS, has mostly returned services to students, faculty, and staff.

Tim Brooks, vice provost for Information Technology and Library Services, said, “The outage was most likely caused hardware failure in our storage array in Omaha.”

Explaining that Creighton has two data centers, one here in Omaha and a secondary site in Lincoln which functions as a disaster recovery site, Brooks said, “The recent service disruption affected IT services running out of the Omaha data center. Most student services are cloud-based, including Office 365, BlueLine, BlueCafe, Examsoft and others, so they were unaffected by the outage.”

Multiple representatives from the University, including Brooks and the Rev. Daniel Hendrickson, S.J., made it clear that this outage was not caused by a cyber attack or any sort of external threat.

In an email to students, Hendrickson said, “To be clear, we have no reason to believe the interruption was caused by anything other than a pervasive hardware issue.”

At the time of publication, most IT services were restored, according to Brooks, and ITLS is taking steps to “pinpoint the source of the hardware failure.”

However, some students are still feeling frustration due to the incomplete return of services. Ayushi Kaul, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said. “It is frustrating to try and print at four different printers and not have a single one work when you have deadlines and classes and pay to go to this university.”

Brooks encourages students to reach out to the myIT service desk if they are still experiencing interruptions.