MyConcordia glitches on first day back

MyConcordia’s homepage
MyConcordia's homepage

Returning to school after winter break was harder than usual this Tuesday, as technical issues with the servers prohibited many students and faculty members from logging onto their MyConcordia portals.

The website, which serves the over 45,000 students enrolled at Concordia in addition to hundreds of staff and faculty members, was unable to handle the influx of people trying to log in on Jan. 3, the first day of the winter semester.

“The system was up but not everybody could get in,” said university spokesperson Chris Mota, citing “higher than expected” volume as the reason why the website wasn’t functioning properly.

“Well it’s very inconvenient,” said John Emil Vincent, a professor in the English department. Vincent could not access Moodle to post the course syllabus or email his students until a few hours before class on Jan. 4.

Mike, a responder for the university’s Instructional and Information Technology Services Helpline, explained that while IITS became aware of the issue on Tuesday morning, “it wasn’t really clear what the problem was.”

“They were attempting to fix it,” he said, referring to the IITS technicians whose job is to maintain Concordia’s servers. “It just took a little longer than expected.”

Priya Patel, an English Literature major, said that she was unable to log into her account until 9 p.m.

“I couldn’t log on in the afternoon,” said Patel. “And once I logged onto the portal, registration was still down because of overflow. Really frustrating.”

IITS left a notice on the front page of MyConcordia.ca warning users of “intermittent interruptions” to the portal and offering students an alternative link to access their class schedules.

Server capacity has since been increased to address the problem.

(Story updated at 10 p.m. 05/01/12)

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