Students React to WiFi Outage Over Weekend

Angelica Acevedo, Editor-In-Chief • November 14, 2018

Resident students experienced a WiFi outage on the St. John’s University Queens campus during the weekend.

According to Anne Rocco Pacione, St. John’s executive director of Infrastructure and interim chief information officer, the outage to the SJUMobile connection was “unexpected.”

“There was an unexpected system failure over the weekend and our team worked quickly to restore service,” she said.

According to some students who dorm on the Queens campus, there was no WiFi from Saturday, Nov. 10 to Sunday, Nov. 11.

“It affected me extremely negatively, I was pretty upset because I need the internet for most basic things in my life, especially pertaining to school assignments and such,” Junior and Carey Hall resident Matt Saroufim said.

Saroufim also added that access to the SJUGuest WiFi would have sufficed, as students usually use SJUMobile on their electronics.

However, other students found that SJUGuest did provide them with internet when they signed on to it.

“I just tried [it] because I really needed to get back on the WiFi because I was working on a big assignment,” Sophomore Bernadette Smith said.

Smith also added that the university didn’t send an internal communications email about the outage.

“I thought it was kind of annoying that the University didn’t address the WiFi being down, especially because it was down for so long,” she said.

Although some students claim that they had WiFi access at St. Augustine Hall, DAC and Montgoris Dining Hall, Pacione explained that it was temporary and only affected some buildings in the Residence Village.

“It was intermittent, not every Residence Village building was completely affected, and we were able to resolve the issues by Sunday evening,” Pacione said.

StormCard access was also down in the Residence Village, which meant that students weren’t able to sign in overnight guests.

This outage comes shortly after a previous issue with students’ StormCard access, as students weren’t able to gain entry to their rooms for several hours during the early morning of Nov. 1.

Pacione offered some advice to students who dorm when the WiFi isn’t working in the Residence halls.

“If WiFi is down in the Residence Village, students can come back to main campus to use wireless,” Pacione said. “We understand how critical this service is and we are always looking at new measures to ensure its resilience. We appreciated our students’ patience while we worked to restore service.”

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About the Contributor

Angelica Acevedo, Editor-in-Chief

Angelica Acevedo is a senior journalism major with a minor in history. She has been involved with the Torch since her freshman year, and served as News Editor, Social Media Manager, Opinion Editor and Managing Editor in the past three years. As Editor-in-Chief, she hopes to continue to publish impactful, interesting and important stories that the St. John’s community needs to know. Angelica also hopes to grow the newspaper’s staff and contributors by creating an outreach position that will serve to reach out to students that are interested in practicing journalism and organizing workshops to keep them involved. Moreover, she wants readers to understand the work that journalists do and will advocate for more media literacy during her last year at St. John’s University. Have any questions? Email Angelica at [email protected]