TO: All UCSB Employees, Faculty, and Students
FR: Matt Hall, Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology & Chief Information Officer
RE: UC Santa Barbara Computer Network Disruption 4/24/19

As you know, the campus experienced a disruption of its computer network for several hours during the afternoon of April 24, 2019. The incident was the result of a misconfigured device attached to the network that caused a major routing disruption. Despite modern security and operational controls, this machine disabled our network's access to the Internet. The disruption also affected our campus email, although incoming emails were queued and delivered as soon as network service restored. 

We are undertaking a root cause analysis of this event in conjunction with an examination of ways to provide more consistent and up-to-date information to our community. Our ongoing initiative to move specific services to the Cloud meant that our Pantheon-hosted web sites remained available, as did many of our applications and new capabilities that we host at Amazon. We plan to accelerate moving all remaining campus-based email dependencies to the Cloud. 

There are number of additional initiatives underway to improve our network performance. This summer, we will upgrade our high-speed core routing and switching equipment with up-to-date routers and high-speed switches that offer 40 Gbps to our campus buildings and 100 Gbps in our core routing infrastructure. Earlier this year, we assembled a group of network specialists from UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara to perform a network assessment; they will review our systems this spring. 

We know that our campus community relies on its computer network to support the University's mission of teaching, research, and learning. I want to reiterate our commitment to resolving any issues the outage caused for our students, faculty, and staff, and to work to minimize the frequency and duration of future disruptions. 

I am happy to answer any specific questions about this incident. Thank you.