Southwest Quadrant Network Outages

Over the course of the day and evening on Sunday, November 30, 2025 there were a series of outages as core switching equipment rebooted without command or logged reason. There were at least 4 major interruptions to network access due to these events. The outages started just after 11:00AM and the latest was 9:55PM. Each outage lasted 10-15 minutes, with a longer more serious service interruption affecting Engelmann Hall at roughly 7:30PM that was not caused by any restarts, but a physical problem with fiber optic transceivers carrying network traffic to and from that building.

Network Engineering staff have made several configuration changes to mitigate issues and attempt to discern the root cause of uncommanded reboots. Vendor resources are being brought to bear at top priority as well. As of 11:00PM the core network equipment providing access for SWQ as well as the off-campus sites for School of Freshwater Sciences, Continuing Education Plankinton, Zilber School of Public Health, and WUWM Chase Tower has remained stable and operational. Engineers are preparing additional equipment and will perform an emergency replacement of core switches if further outages make this necessary.

All network access to and from any WiFi or ethernet device in any building in SouthWest Quadrant of UWM’s Kenwood Campus as well as any devices located at School of Freshwater Science, Continuing Education Plankington, Zilber School of Public Health, and WUWM Chase Tower are affected by this outage. During these events devices may appear to remain online (green link lights, normal wifi signal) but no access to network resources is possible.

12/01/2025 6:56 AM - UITS Network engineers along with the vendor have determined the root cause as a hardware failure in a critical piece of network equipment. A replacement is being sent with high priority.

12/01/2025 6:56 AM - Network engineers are working on an interim solution using other available equipment in the meantime. There are likely to be further network outages for all buildings in the SW Quadrant of the Kenwood Campus as well as off-campus sites throughout the morning before and during the replacement process.

12/01/2025 9:19 AM - The failed equipment has been removed from production and interim hardware is maintaining service while the long-term replacement is shipped from the vendor. All networks are operational and there should be no degradation in service. UITS NOC will schedule a maintenance window to swap the permanent replacement into production after it arrives. That maintenance will be scheduled to minimize any further disruption to UWM operations.

12/01/2025 4:32 PM - Closing this outage as service has been stable since 8:20AM on the temporary gear. A planned outage will be posted when replacements arrive and are scheduled to go into production.