As early as 11 a.m. on March 7, the College and surrounding areas experienced an outage in internet connection. The outage, caused by a “break in [the College’s internet carrier’s] fiberoptic cable plant,” was officially announced around 3:30 p.m. the same day by Vince DiScipio, senior director of information technology.
The outage hindered connectivity to all campus platforms –– including Moodle and college websites –– and limited the capabilities of some student organizations that rely on ethernet connection in their spaces, like WOO-91, and pushed the deadline for Student Organization Budget Requests back one day. Without connection to their point-of-sale systems, Old Main Café, Knowlton and MacLeod’s C-Store were closed for the entirety of Friday after the internet outage.
In DiScipio’s message, he noted that Wooster’s internet carrier was working to locate the break in the fiber optic cable and had no estimate of when the services would be restored. Around 6:25 p.m., the internet connection on campus was restored, as DiScipio shared in an update message. DiScipio noted that the “damaged section of fiber optic cable was bypassed by our service provider.” Wooster’s provider will monitor services to ensure they remain available.
