myblog.arts outage – message from IT Services

As an update to the recent outage of myblog.arts and other UAL web services, Gareth Bedford of IT Services has shared the following message:

On behalf of IT Services, I would like to sincerely apologise for last weeks’ disruptions after the power down at Elephant & Castle; it was really very frustrating and extremely disappointing for everybody involved.

If all of our hardware had powered back on as expected, UAL would have had all IT services back on line by 6pm on Saturday 15 March. Unfortunately a critical security device failed, and multiple complex configurations needed to be carefully recreated and tested. Our networking specialists, a firewall specialist consultant and others worked on this for extended hours over the weekend and the majority of IT services were restored by midday on Monday. Further services were resumed on Tuesday and Wednesday, and all services were available by the end of Thursday 20 March.

We are in the process of reviewing what went wrong, and we are drafting plans to ensure that we take steps to ensure that this type of disruption does not happen again.

The situation over last weekend was one that none of us would ever like to repeat. We deeply regret the disruption that this has caused.