Blackboard maintenance left students struggling to submit dissertations

The Aber Uni Blackboard servers went down this morning between 8.30 and 10am for weekly maintenance reasons, leaving third years temporarily unable to submit their dissertations only hours before the deadline.

Dealing with a looming dissertation deadline is stressful at the best of times, however Aberystwyth students experienced additional pressure as the Blackboard online server was unavailable this morning.

While most students have submitted their undergraduate dissertation yesterday, last minute submissions were prevented temporarily as Turnitin was unavailable due to maintenance.

Does that raise your blood pressure?

Information Services staff on the desk told us: “Every week, Information Services staff reset the online server for an hour or two on Tuesday mornings.” This lead to Blackboard and Turnitin being unavailable for an hour or two on dissertation deadline day.

The reset is usually not problematic, however with only hours to spare students were left in the dark about why they could not access the servers and submit their final work. Fortunately, the servers were back up and running again before the 12pm deadline.

Information Services staff are still speculating why the servers impacted the submission process so severely, however it is suspected that – as the system was weakened anyway – the requests for Blackboard and Turnitin led to a temporary error signal.

A University spokesperson communicated: “Access to Blackboard was affected from 8.45am and while access for most students and staff was restored at 9.30am full service was restored by 10.30am. We communicated this unexpected loss of access to Blackboard via our usual means.”

“We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused and hope the steps outlined above will reassure students and staff that we take this matter seriously and every effort has been made to avoid a repeat of this situation.”

International Politics student Nathan Coogan said: “I had a nightmare submitting, blackboard out right just wouldn’t log me in on the morning my dissertation was due.”

He added: “Once it let me on turn it in was then struggling with the amount of submissions going through because the uni organised a routine site maintenance on the day one of the biggest departments had their diss deadline, really that’s just unacceptable and any sort of forward planning from the university would evidently prevented that.”