The my.american portal experienced a complete two-hour outage Monday morning after a technical problem and increased usage caused the failure, according to Ed Martin, deputy chief information officer in the Office of Information Technology.
In addition to the complete two-hour outage of portal usage, students may have experienced problems throughout Monday and into Tuesday, Martin wrote in an e-mail.
The portal outage left many students unable to check their schedules on the first day of classes, forcing some to miss class.
Blaine Toups, a junior in the School of Public Affairs, was forced to guess where his classes were being held.
"I [checked] my classes last week, and because I couldn't check it during the day I had to guess where to go."
"I remembered the three classrooms that I needed to go to, but not which classes went with which classrooms," he said. "So I went to each classroom and asked if I was in the right place," Toups said. "I actually made it to all three."
OIT has been working since the outage on Monday to correct the problem and has been slowly increasing the number of users able to simultaneously access my.american. On Tuesday, 1,000 users were able to access the portal at a time, according to Martin.
The original problem occurred Monday morning when a corrupt database index caused Datatel to run out of available licenses. Datatel is the "central information system for student records, alumni records and university administrative information," according to Martin.
When using the my.american portal, students, faculty and alumni are actually referencing Datatel or one of its support systems, he said.
Once Datatel ran out of licenses, the system would not allow any more connections, preventing students from accessing any information in Datatel.
"Indexes become corrupt on occasion in Datatel. This is to be expected in a complex database," Martin said.
The combination of a corrupt Datatel index and the high usage on the first day of class caused the system to stop working.
"We have experienced peak times in the first week of classes in prior semesters but prior problems usually caused an experience of slower access and task execution," he said. "The exact problem of the corrupt index and compounded portal impact would have been difficult to foresee."
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