CTL Blog

Systemwide Outages at SPH on Wednesday, August 17

August 17, 2011 | 1 Minute Read

Just before 10am on Wednesday, August 17, there was a major power outage which affected a good portion of the JHU East Baltimore campus, and the School of Public Health in particular. As a result of this power outage, the SPH data center went offline after a brief period on backup power. The SPH data center is where the servers for CoursePlus, the online courses, JHSPH email, the my.jhsph.edu portal, and other services are housed. As a result, there was no access to CoursePlus, the online courses, or nearly any JHSPH website until approximately 4pm in the afternoon.

After the power outage, there were additional problems as a result of the outage which prevented CoursePlus and the online courses from coming back right away. CoursePlus was back up at 4:40pm and the online courses at 4:55pm.

This outage was obviously completely unplanned and a major disruption in the educational life at the School. JHSPH Information Systems worked as hard as they could to bring services back online quickly, but ongoing power issues prevented them from doing so until late in the afternoon.

Planned outages for CoursePlus and online courses are listed on this blog.

We apologize for the obvious inconvenience these outages caused but without power, servers and websites cannot run.