A total of 2,100 students scheduled to enroll in courses for the spring semester were offered earlier appointment times, after the Student Information System crashed Monday due to heavy traffic on the site for course enrollment between 4 and 8 p.m.
Laura Hawthorne, associate vice provost and University registrar, and Chief Information Officer Virginia Evans notified the students affected by the change in an email Wednesday afternoon.
“While we work toward a permanent resolution, we are implementing changes to improve the performance of SIS during enrollment this week,” the email said. “As part of this ongoing effort, we are randomly assigning new, earlier appointment times for some students.”
The changes will affect three randomly selected groups of 350 second-year students who are scheduled to enroll Thursday and three groups of 350 first-year students who are scheduled to enroll Friday. The students will now enroll at earlier appointment times “to further distribute the load on the system at any one time,” according to Hawhtorne and Evans.
They also suggested that students use only one device at a time to log onto SIS and avoid refreshing the page.
After the system crash Monday, Information Technology Services identified a piece of code in the new interface that was likely responsible.
“Our vendors identified this piece of code that is likely causing the issue,” Evans said. “They're working around the clock to address it, and in the meantime, we have dedicated more resources. We think that will help, but it's not going to completely solve the problem.”
Hawthorne added that the number of sessions, which is affected by how many times a user refreshes a page, overloaded the site.
“At 5:45 p.m., we had 28,000 active sessions at that point, and that's when we started to see significant issues,” Hawthorne said.
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