Users could not connect to certain GMU websites, experienced network slowness trying to connect to applications.

All Mason community affected by this intermittent outage.

The connection between the Head End PE or HEPE and Firewall was flapping. The reason for the flapping was from enabling port channel on the HEPE to the special multicast fusion router. Once the the port was enabled it caused a multicast loop which in turn caused the flooding of the network and the Firewall to flap up and down.

The fix was to turn off the port channel for multicast, once turned off all networks, Websites and applications came back online.

We have a template in place to put in the static route for multicast so this will not happen again.