Network Firewall Issue Causes Interruptions; Services Now Fully Restored

On Wednesday night, April 12, Stanford experienced a network issue that resulted in clients being unable to access some services provided by campus partners such as R&DE and the Stanford Libraries. No hospital systems were affected.

By early morning, University IT (UIT) addressed the issue and all services are now operating normally.

Services inaccessible

Late Wednesday evening (around 9:30 p.m.) and into early Thursday morning (2:00 a.m.), some members of the Stanford community were unable to connect to services, including: 

• R&DE systems such as Housing Applications, StarRez, POS payments via campus card and MyMealPlan
• Stanford Libraries systems such as SearchWorks and library websites
• the Farmshare community computing environment
• Legacy Postgrads
• Campus card access systems Lenel (ACES) and CS Gold. These systems retained access granted prior to the outage, but didn't receive any new updates.

​UIT networking engineers isolated the cause to the DC2 firewall on Stanford's network infrastructure and engaged the vendor to work on a solution. The work corrected the problem and the affected services were accessible again at approximately 1:50 a.m.

Services restored, monitoring continues

All services are now restored and fully operational. UIT will continue to monitor these services and explore methods to reduce the impact of similar issues.

We apologize for any inconvenience this service outage caused.