Students trying to access information on Blackboard during parts of fall break just found error messages.
The problem was rare, administrators said, and when the University fully transitions to Sakai in December 2012, similar problems will be even less likely.
The Blackboard website experienced connectivity issues beginning at 11 p.m. Oct. 22 and continuing into Oct. 23, said Michael Barker, assistant vice chancellor for infrastructure and operations and chief technology officer.
The issues were a result of unusually high traffic on another website, which affected Blackboard through a shared load balancer, which regulates website functionality, Barker said.
An unusually large load of traffic on a website that uses the same load balancer as Blackboard made its connectivity suffer, he said.
“The cause of the problem was completely independent of Blackboard,” Barker said.
Information Technology Services, which monitors problems, immediately began trying to end the outage, Barker said.
Blackboard can be sensitive to connection errors because of its older technology, said Ethan Kromhout, director of applications infrastructure for ITS.
Sakai would likely not have experienced the same problems if it had been in place across the University, Kromhout said.
Its newer technology would have responded more effectively to interruptions in connectivity than Blackboard would have, he added.
“This particular problem would not be an issue with Sakai,” Kromhout said.
