What's With All the Site Errors Lately?
In the past couple weeks, you've probably encountered a brief period of time where every single course website that you try to access gives you a "An Error Has Occurred" message. This goes on for anywhere from 10-15 minutes, then it magically goes away and all is well again.
The reason for this is a problem in the database in which all of the information displayed in online courses is stored. The database cluster which powers all the online courses (and CoursePlus, for that matter) is run by the very good team in JHSPH Information Systems. Information Systems is working very hard to resolve this problem. It's a bit tricky, and they've brought in experts from Microsoft's main offices to work on the issue with them.
IS and the Microsoft team have already performed a number of tasks in an attempt to resolve this problem. It's unfortunately more complex than they initially thought, and so the problem still isn't solved. We'll certainly provide you with updates as soon as the situation changes.
In the meantime, if you do run in to this problem and have the time and patience to wait 10-15 minutes, the problem will just go away.