Dear UO community member,
Our records show that you were one of the people affected by an unusual technology outage at the University of Oregon this week. The outage affected access to UOmail, Teams, and other Microsoft services, as well as Dropbox and the UO Service Portal.
I understand how disruptive it has been for such fundamental tools to be unavailable during such a critical time in the academic year. There is no specific reason why your account was impacted while others were not. Please accept my sincere apologies.
I'm glad to report that, as of yesterday (Thursday, June 8), most impacts of this outage have been resolved. Please see below for details, and continue checking the IT Service Status website for the latest updates.
Remaining Impacts
Service access and email flow were restored for most people by Wednesday morning, June 7. Others issues were resolved yesterday, and a few remain.
- Incoming email flow. For the vast majority of affected accounts, mail flow was fully restored early Wednesday morning (June 7). For a small number of accounts that remained affected, inbound mail flow was restored early yesterday morning (Thursday, June 8).
- Emails sent to affected accounts. During the outage (mainly on Tuesday), some emails sent to affected accounts bounced. However, other messages ended up in a limbo state within our systems. Yesterday our team ran two processes to deliver messages from the latter category into people's UOmail inboxes—first around 12:30 p.m. and again at 5:00 p.m. Depending on your email program, the recovered messages may appear with either yesterday's date or their original send dates.
- Teams calling. Service has been restored for those affected. If you previously had Teams calling and haven't seen your dial pad return, please log out of Teams and log back in again.
- Teams private channel access. If you've lost access to private Teams channels, the owners or members of those channels should be able to restore your access. If that's not possible, please submit a ticket at Microsoft Teams support.
What Happened
The problem began on Monday, June 5, around 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, when our new Duck ID system vendor performed planned maintenance. That work had been requested by Information Services staff to improve system performance. Despite testing by both UO and the vendor, an unexpected bug ultimately affected about 4,600 UO accounts, revoking access to services and breaking their inbound email flow. Our team began working on service restoration on Tuesday morning, as soon as the problem was reported.
To prevent a recurrence at this critical time of year, we have paused such work until we better understand what went wrong on Monday. Once we resume work on the Duck ID system, Information Services will use our existing internal review and planning processes to limit disruptions to the university's academic and business functions.
Getting Help
With final exams and commencement around the corner, my team and I wish you a smooth end to spring term.
Sincerely,
Abhijit Pandit
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
