Crest, University of Windsor, June 26, 2019. Blackburn News file photo.Crest, University of Windsor, June 26, 2019. Blackburn News file photo.
Windsor

UPDATE: Cyber attack blamed for computer outage at U of W

The University of Windsor has confirmed that a widespread computer outage on campus was caused by a cybersecurity issue.

Students, faculty, and staff at the school have been dealing with a systems outage for two days. Campus applications such as email, Blackboard, and UWin Student have been down since Monday.

"Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately took steps to secure our systems and mitigate the impact to data and operations," read an email sent to WindsorNewsToday.ca. "A team of leading external cybersecurity experts was engaged to conduct a full investigation. This incident has affected some of our systems, including the UWindsor website, Blackboard, UWin Student site and other University systems, which are temporarily unavailable." 

The school said its IT Services Department has been working to get everybody back online. With some spring and summer students writing exams, U of W said it is working with everybody involved to ensure that course work and exams are completed.

The school said on Twitter Tuesday afternoon that wireless service is working but is spotty in some areas of campus. However, the Microsoft Office 365 desktop application is still usable.

https://twitter.com/UWindsor/status/1539295828258570246

The university's official website also went down and is still inaccessible as of Wednesday afternoon.

The majority of the student body is off-campus for the summer.

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