"Internet, power interruptions plague UB over weekend"

Along with blustering winds and deep snow, a spate of service problems from power outages to Internet service interruptions inconvenienced most of North Campus over the weekend.

Late Saturday and early Sunday morning, 14 buildings on North Campus lost power. A worker reached at the Computing and Information Technology operations center on Sunday said the power outages were likely weather-related, since "arching" patterns were observed. Arching occurs when power jumps from one line to another, and often happens when power lines fall or are damaged.

Strong winds and blowing snow pounded the campus for most of the day Saturday, with temperatures in the low single digits.

Power to most of the buildings was quickly restored, but some buildings remained without power until at least Sunday night. Bell Hall ran off generator power for most of the day, and the Computing Center lost power Sunday afternoon as well.

In addition to the power outages, Internet service was interrupted Saturday night and Sunday morning as well.

The CIT Web site posted an alert stating the service interruption was due to a "denial of service" attack. Denial of service attacks occur when machines on the network begin sending out massive amounts of data, which can flood the network and disrupt legitimate network traffic.

According to the alert, this particular denial-of-service incident overburdened network servers and prevented domain-name lookups. The service interruption began late Saturday, and CIT reset network servers to fix the problem Sunday at about 10:45 a.m.

A CIT official reached at the operations center said the details of the service interruption were not yet clear, but were not related to the power outages.

According to data on CIT's Web site, network activity jumped dramatically - almost 800 percent - at exactly midnight on Saturday, and persisted until the servers were reset. Machines on the network that were corrupted and used in a denial of service attack scheduled to begin at midnight could explain such an anomaly.