Students, faculty and staff experienced some mild discomfort and unease when a campuswide Internet outage occurred Feb. 20.

According to a campus-issued email Feb. 20, the Internet outage occurred due to a damaged fiber optic Internet connection within a utility pole. The damage was so severe that people across northwest Alabama were left without inbound or outbound Internet access for most of the day.

UNA Technology Services responded immediately to attempt to alleviate some of the problems associated with the outage; however, because the computer supplier for north Alabama, Alabama Supercomputer Network (ASN), was the source of the problem, there was little Technology Services could do.

“We received a lot of phone calls when it first happened, but we were able to send out messages through other means,” said Ethan Humphres, UNA assistant director of Information Technology Services.

The Internet outage had a significant impact on UNA students and staff. Across campus, students, faculty and staff were unable to check their UNA Portals or connect to the UNA server.

“Considering I’m taking practically all online classes, I sort of panicked,” said Sarah Powers, UNA student.

Foreign languages department chair and professor Claudia Vance agreed but found an optimistic view about it.

“That afternoon was very strange,” she said. “I found myself without a committee meeting to attend, without email to check and without information to access. I ended up talking to my colleagues in the office and connecting with them more than a normal day allows.”

Powers, who works on campus as a student assistant at the nursing school, said the Internet outage affected her more at work.

“It was really scary to me to realize how much society depends on the Internet,” Powers said. “It’s almost as if the whole world stops if there’s not Internet access.”

Students and staff quickly realized, however, that the Internet could still be accessed through their phones or in areas surrounding campus.

“I had nine items on my to-do list that day and I couldn’t complete any of them without Internet connectivity,” said Ron Davis, assistant professor of computer information systems. “After I finished my lecture, I went home and worked from there so I could access the Internet. I suspect that my colleagues handled the situation in a similar manner.”

UNA Technology Services officials are currently evaluating how they responded to the outage. They are also discussing how they could respond in case an outage of that magnitude occurs again.

“The good thing is that an outage of that nature only occurs about once a year and we are able to be functioning smoothly 24 hours, 365 days a year,” Humphres said.