Slowness or Unable to Login to Patriot Web and Blackboard

February 02, 2024 10:21 a.m.
Outage category: 
Blackboard, Patriot Web
Location: 
All users trying to access applications/websites that required CAS/Shibboleth authentication were potentially impacted.
Status: 
Closed
Resolved alert: 
08/21/2023 9:50 am

Users were unable to log in to various applications and websites that had to authenticate via CAS/Shibboleth.  Some users were getting Timeout errors and some were getting 504 error.

Initial symptoms: 

User calls were being received by the Ops team and Support center that people were having issues logging in to various websites/apps. Users may have received Timeout Exception errors or 504 errors.

Duration: 
08/21/2023 8:00 am - 08/21/2023 9:50 am
Impact to Mason: 

All users were potentially impacted. If their authentication request was routed to the server at Unicon having issues it potentially would have timed out and not been able to login to the application/site they were trying to access.

Affected Services: 
Patriot Web, Blackboard Courses
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Cause: 

One of the servers in a pool of servers on the UNICON side was having issues that required a reboot. Unicon is the vendor that provides/supports CAS/Shibboleth.

Resolution: 

Unicon rebooted the server that appeared to be having issues.

Prevention: 

Unicon confirmed they were looking into additional monitoring options on their side to be alerted when a similar situation occurs again.

STATISTICS
Service Team: 
Email Group, CCSE