Weather continues to affect UB utilities

On Jan. 30, the Internet connection at UB, Canisius College and Daemen College was down for more than six hours.

Chief Information Officer Brice Bible said UB is still investigating the cause of the outage - which lasted from about 3-10 a.m. While the UB network was still functioning, the Internet connection was down.

"We are still getting to the bottom of this," Bible said. "We think it was just one of those bad luck things because of the weather."

He believes water entered a conduit, a tube that holds wires, and froze, disrupting the fiber-optic cables and the signal from downtown to each campus. This broke the Internet signal for the three schools, which share the same Internet Service Provider.

Splicing the wires reconnected the signal and created an alternative route that bypassed the damaged cords.

Mark Coppola, a senior accounting major at Daemen College, said he was unable to connect to the Internet until Friday night. He is taking two online courses and was unable to get any of his work done Thursday night.

Coppola, who is on the Daemen basketball team, has to manage his time for schoolwork because of his busy athletic schedule. He had a game on Saturday, so he was forced to do all of his homework late Sunday night.

Laura Amos, a professor in the School of Management at UB, said the outage forced her to change the way she conducted class on Thursday. She said, ironically, her MGQ 201 class, Introduction to Computers and Statistics, was unable to access the videos she had planned for lecture.

But with a background in educational psychology, Amos knew how to teach her class in a less technology-dependent way.

"You can't ever depend on technology," Amos said. "As a teacher, you have to be flexible; you have to adapt and you can't dwell on it."

Prior to class, Amos didn't have her phone with her, so she didn't receive a text or email from UB Alert stating there was an Internet outage. She said if she had known earlier, she wouldn't have canceled class - but she would have changed her lesson plan.

UB, who is overseeing the investigation and the fix, is putting in steps to prevent an outage like this from happening in the future. Bible said the university is creating "redundant connections" downtown meaning if the wires are damaged again, there will already be a secondary route for Internet access.

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