Many University staff members and students experienced interruptions to their work at the City Centre Campus during March 2024 due to wireless network disruptions. The IT Center network specialists worked hard to resolve the issue and ascertain the highly elusive cause of the disruptions, finally identified as an exceptionally malfunctioned wireless access point at the City Centre Campus. The network service disruption did not involve a denial-of-service attack or other cyber-attack.
The wireless network disruption began on a smaller scale at the end of February 2024. At that time, the connection issues still appeared as brief, intermittent interruptions in University wireless network connections. The full extent of the network disruption became apparent in early March, after the end of the winter holiday season.
IT Center network specialists set up a situation room and began resolving the issue immediately after the extent of the network disruption became apparent. Resolving the issue was challenging, as wireless network disruptions occurred in different City Centre Campus buildings at different times. This made it difficult to rule out possible hardware or system failure-related causes.
After extensive debugging and investigation, our network specialists identified an exceptionally malfunctioning wireless access point as the root cause of the network disruptions. The malfunctioning wireless access point – located at a University City Centre Campus building – reflected faulty control messages back to the University network. These control messages affected network settings and caused City Centre Campus network devices to periodically disconnect wireless connections to other campuses and the Internet.
We kept University staff and students up-to-date on the situation during the network disruptions on Flamma News feeds and Virtanen, the IT Helpdesk front page, via service break notifications (e.g. in the System Notifications window on Flamma and the status.helsinki.fi page), on X and Viva Engage's “Tietotekniikan vertaistuki” (IT support) channel.
Tip! Stay up-to-date on University IT news on Flamma:
1. By filtering Flamma's University news feed by the subject IT.
2. By selecting News and events -> News -> Topic -> IT from Flamma’s navigation menu.
Our warmest thanks to University staff and students for your patience during the wireless network disruptions!
Please remember that our IT Helpdesk is at your disposal with University IT issues:
- By chat (weekdays 9 a.m.–3 p.m., chatbot 24/7): helpdesk.it.helsinki.fi/en
- Tel. +358 (0)29 41 55555 (weekdays 9 a.m.–3 p.m., local network charge/mobile call charge)
- By email: helpdesk@helsinki.fi
Also follow the status of University systems on our status page: status.helsinki.fi