Mississippi State University Information Technology Services (ITS) will be applying emergency updates to MSU’s wireless network on Tuesday evening, January 30, beginning at 8:00 p.m.

Users can expect intermittent wireless outages throughout campus beginning at 8:00 p.m. tonight and ending at 2:00 a.m. January 31.

Director of Information Technology Infrastructure Gerhard Lehnerer said that ITS is responding to recent wireless outages across campus.

“There’s a bug in the software that we’re running that handles the wireless for campus and we’ve been having some intermittent outages in various buildings for the last week, and we think we’ve identified a fix for it. We’re going to implement it tonight to see if that solves our problem.”

Lehnerer said that ITS makes use of network controllers to manage the thousands of wireless access points on campus. He said ITS believes a software bug in these controllers is the cause of recent outages.

For up to six hours, there will be a series of rolling restarts that may result in an unstable wireless connection on campus.

“So, you may have coverage, it may work, it may not work – you know how that is. It is not going to be down for the entire time,” Lehnerer said. “But I wouldn’t put my Canvas exam due at midnight on the fact that the wireless will be on right. There are going to be some intermittent outages while we apply patches, reboot things, upgrade some things that have to go along with this patch.”

Lehnerer said that normally, ITS gives a 48-hour notice for network maintenance.

“This is essentially a very short notice, a very short cycle because of the impact we’ve been seeing on the community. And so that’s why we’re doing it tonight and with such short notice, as opposed to the 48 hours we’d normally give,” Lehnerer said.

For additional information, contact the ITS Service Desk at (662) 325-0631 or by email at [email protected].