This past Tuesday, Oct. 25, the Harding University campus experienced an Internet outage that affected not only the school, but also the town of Searcy as well as the surrounding areas, such as Arkansas State University in Beebe. The campus Internet became unusable at about 11 a.m. and returned just before 8 p.m.
Keith Cronk, Vice President of Information Systems and Technology, said the reason for the Internet outage was due to an accidentally cut AT&T cable line near Vilonia and ASU-Beebe. While he is not sure what sort of cable it was, he said he thought it was at least a 9-inch cable.
“Once the Internet went out, there was nothing much for [IS&T] to do but wait like all of the other offices on campus,” Cronk said. “There was not much we could do since it was not a campus problem.”
With the Internet out, many students could not complete schoolwork. For a technological age so dependent on the Internet, being unconnected gives more problems than not being able to check Facebook.
“I was trying to work on phonetics and get on Dictionary.com to see transcriptions of words and if I was transcribing them properly,” said junior Molly Shoaf, who studies communication sciences and disorders. “I also was trying to email an outline to a friend who was in my group for Bible, and I was unable to do either one. I even went to my mom’s house off campus to see if I could use the Internet there, but since we are AT&T, we did not have Internet at home either.”
The outage was also exceptionally troublesome for students with computer-based projects.
“I have three projects due next week and I need the Internet for some part of all three of them,” said senior Charlene Nutt, a computer science major. “I also only had two classes yesterday and more time to work on it, but without the Internet, I was unable to get much done. I also had a quiz set up on Moodle I was supposed to take, but that did not happen either. Luckily, the teacher moved the quiz back.”
The testing lab also experienced trouble since students were unable to take online tests or lost their work when the Internet crashed.
“We are doing recovery work for the testing lab to help get the lost work back for those who lost it during tests,” Cronk said.
Though Moodle was unusable, Pipeline still remained accessible. Cronk said Pipeline is a part of an on-campus internal server, which made it accessible for students on campus but not off.
In the case of an emergency in which the Internet is out, the school has other avenues to inform the student body of danger or anything important it needs to know about, such as through the texting alert system and regular phone lines., Cronk said.
by J.M. Adkison and Alexis Hosticka
