Northwestern University Information Technology experienced “intermittent connectivity issues” for nearly five hours Monday morning and afternoon, resulting in spotty Internet service in many campus buildings.

Wendy Woodward, director of technology support services, said NUIT was first alerted to the issues at about 11:30 a.m. Monday. Woodward said the sporadic connectivity “affected the majority of the buildings in Evanston and Chicago.”

Woodward said it is unclear what the specific cause was of the disturbance, which impacted both wireless and wired networks.

“Generally speaking, it looks like the network was seeing a lot of heavy traffic from some source but we don’t have actual details and specifics at this time,” she said. “To rectify the situation we were able to make adjustments to the network settings, and slowly as we saw that work through the network routers we saw things begin to stabilize.”

When first alerted to the issues Monday morning, Woodward said NUIT contacted its network vendor, and the organization’s engineers and technical staff met every 20 to 30 minutes throughout the afternoon.

The main NUIT networks in both Evanston and Chicago had stabilized by 3 p.m. while kinks in the organization’s “specialty networks” had been ironed out by 4 p.m.

Woodward preached patience, saying NUIT would use Monday’s outage to attempt to prevent similar issues in the future.

“NUIT appreciates everyone’s patience today as we worked through the issues as they presented themselves, and we will do everything possible to understand what happened so that we can avoid it in the future,” she said.

— Joseph Diebold