The St. Edward’s University campus did not have Internet access for nearly six hours Dec. 1.

Internet access went down around 9 a.m. and returned between 3:15 and 3:30 p.m. that day.  Director of Digital Infrastructure Benjamin Hockenhull said the cause of the outage is still under investigation.

IT contacted both of St. Edward’s Internet providers and the university’s network hardware vendor, Enterasys, to help resolve the outage. Hockenhull said that they did many things that normally would have resolved a problem, but in this instance, these things did not help.

Hockenhull said that they determined that a failure of the routing hardware or a misconfiguration was not the cause of the outage, but that it appears to be some sort of external event.

“We are not sure. We do not think it is hacking,” Hockenhull said in response to being asked if hacking was the cause.

Hockenhull said that it is possible that a traffic flood or denial of service attack caused the outage.

Hockenhull said that the outage was “very significant” and that the university had invested a fair bit of money into network structure and reliability.

“Our goal is high reliability of service,” Hockehull said.

If a similar outage were to happen in the future, Hockenhull said that in conjunction with the equipment vendor, the university has developed several contingency plans.