RE: Systems Status

Good Afternoon everyone,

Hopefully you have all seen your emails streaming in as the system come back online. All emails were “held” until they were delivered.

Our internet provider on St. Thomas – CHOICE—incurred a lightning strike last night at approximately 9:45 that disabled its connection to both ATT and Global Crossing. This is a system wide failure that effects all of their customers. When their main systems went down, they switched to a backup broadcast system on STX at Global Crossing. Their back up system on STX AND our backup system on STX both failed to take over as ours has done in the past because of a failure upstream with the international provider coming out of Florida. Our engineers were able to temporarily reconfigure our systems to bypass this problem and allow our connection in STX to serve the STT campus. We do not know how long CHOICE will be out, so if we lose connectivity STX to our internet service – which has happened several times in the past few weeks – we will be without service. Also please keep in mind that STX and STT are now sharing the Internet service. We will monitor usage and monitor how long CHOICE may need to restore service. We do have the option of increasing bandwidth into STX if we need to.

We are also finalizing remediation of the interruptions with the vc services. The services are online and running with little or no interruptions. We may experience brief periods this afternoon as testing sand remediation are finalized. I will update you all at the end of the day on the scope of that issue and the resolution.

Everyone have a pleasant day and continue to call the helpdesk with problems or issues.

Tina