Dear colleagues and students,

We are performing an essential upgrade of the University firewall that will take place over the weekend of Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 September. This upgrade is part of our ongoing efforts to improve the security, performance and reliability of our network infrastructure and will reduce the likelihood of issues similar to those experienced last week.

Please read the following information carefully and take any necessary actions to avoid any inconvenience or loss of data during the upgrade.

We will be upgrading the Data Centre firewall infrastructure starting on Saturday 7 September at 07:00 with the work expected to be completed by Sunday 8 September at 18:00.

During this upgrade, the University network infrastructure will be briefly unavailable to all staff and students on Saturday morning between 07:00 and 10:00, however, services may be intermittent across the weekend while testing is completed. During this time, the following services may be impacted:

• Wired and wifi connectivity
• VPN
• High performance compute (HPC) facilities
• Data centre connectivity
• All services managed by Digital and Technology Services

We kindly ask that users of the HPC ensure no tasks or jobs are scheduled to run during this weekend.

Although we do not anticipate any issues, if you do encounter any problems after the upgrade, please log a call through help4u@dundee.ac.uk.

We will keep you informed of any progress as the upgrade proceeds via our Service Status Page.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Kind regards,

Kenny Gillen

Head of Infrastructure and Research Computing

The work is underway. We'll keep you updated on our progress.

The work is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

We are carrying out maintenance on our MyDesktop servers, through this time the service may not be available. We advise that everybody logs off prior to the work starting at 17.30

The work is underway. We'll keep you updated on our progress.

The work is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

We've had reports that some users are experiencing issues using Google search, either built into the web browser or using a direct link.

At this time it would appear using another search engine such as bing : https://www.bing.com/ works as expected

After some investigation alongside our third-party supplier, we have an emergency change tonight which we hope will resolve the issues we are seeing however we will keep our status page up to date.

Affected by this issue? Login to the Help4U Self-Service Portal (help4u.dundee.ac.uk), click on the relevant 'Broad service disruption', then select 'I am affected by this disruption'.

After our change last night, this issue appears to be resolved based on our testing and checking in with Staff who had previously reported issues.

Thanks for your patience and apologies for any inconvenience caused

-DTS

Microsoft has made us aware that they are currently investigating reports of various issues with Microsoft 365 Services, we are experiencing this in particular with Microsoft Teams.

It appears Web Teams - https://teams.microsoft.com/v2/ works the best

We're closely monitoring Microsoft updates and will update this post with progress.

Thanks

DTS

Microsoft has now marked this incident as resolved, there appear to have been various issues with multiple internet service providers this Morning which as a result had an impact on Microsoft 365 Services.

Thanks

DTS

Whilst Microsoft has confirmed there are no underlying issues with their services, there are several underlying issues with Internet service providers which provide key parts of infrastructure to areas within the UK.

Whilst these are recovering currently, there are still issues impacting some Staff and Students within the University.

We are continuing to monitor the situation, general advice from various providers online is that if you are home working restart your router.

Thanks

DTS

After our testing and reviewing existing reports of issues with accessing Microsoft 365 services in particular Microsoft Teams.

We apologise for the inconvenience, if you do continue to experience issues please get in touch via help4u.dundee.ac.uk

Thanks

DTS