Trunk, Tufts' learning management system, was restored to service yesterday at 1:30 a.m. after being down for approximately 13 hours.
The disruption in service occurred at 11:47 a.m. on Monday when a member of the University Information Technology (UIT) team accidentally deleted a part of the infrastructure that must be present in order for Trunk to work, according to Director of Communications and Organizational Effectiveness Dawn Irish.
The deletion occurred during a routine cleanup after a system update, according to Director of Educational and Scholarly Technology Services Gina Siesing. Trunk did not lose any data in the process, she said.
The university first sent an email to alert the community of the service disruption at approximately 3 p.m. on Monday. The email said service would be restored between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.
At approximately 10 p.m., the university stated in another email to the community that service had not been restored, and it was still working to correct the problem.
A third email sent around 9 a.m. yesterday said that Trunk was up and running normally again and apologized for the inconvenience to all those affected.
"Such extended downtime is rare for Tufts, and we are very concerned about this major disruption in service," the email said.
The process of restoring Trunk took much longer than expected, Siesing said.
"Several files that are key did not actually get copied over to the right place," she said. "It took a few tries for that process to work."
UIT met yesterday to debrief the situation and has begun to fill out a service disruption report in order to specify the cause of the incident and consider ways to prevent a similar incident in the future, Irish said.
Members of UIT go through training in how to restore systems quickly if they should have an interruption in service, Irish said.
"Before Trunk was live, they went through all sorts of scenarios where the system could go down and how they would restore it," she said. "We try to be proactive."
Some professors postponed tests because students could not use Trunk to study class material.
Associate Professor of Political Science Deborah Schildkraut's political psychology class was supposed to have an exam yesterday, but she postponed it because Trunk was not available, according to junior Kira Hessekiel.
"My professor emailed the classes saying that our test would be canceled because Trunk was down and we couldn't use the readings to review," she said.
