Service restored to college websites

ALLENDALE, Mich. (WOOD) - Service was restored Wednesday morning to several Michigan college websites that were not working late Tuesday night.

24 Hour News 8 discovered the outage affected schools that use Merit Network as their website provider.

A viewer notified 24 Hour News 8 via ReportIt about the outage that lasted almost five hours.

Some of the colleges affected included: Grand Valley State University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Central Michigan University and Michigan Technological University.

The CEO of Merit Network told 24 Hour News 8 his company's entire staff worked to fix the problem.

Merit Network has 300 members that use the system, including public school districts.

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A statement from Merit Network --

Network Services Update

Around midnight on Tuesday, February 26, 2013, Merit's Network Support Center began receiving alerts and phone calls from Merit Members reporting that they were experiencing problems connecting to the Internet.

Our Support Center and engineers began analyzing the effect of the problem and determined that it was an issue with one of Merit's core routers/switches located at Merit's POP in Chicago. Merit Engineers were able to determine that it was a packet forwarding problem in the way the packets were being handled on one of our key core routers. Once this was determined, all traffic was moved to a different path and different equipment. Merit has multiple 10 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) connections to the greater Internet (commodity) out of Michigan and was able to move the traffic to other paths that have capacity to handle the traffic load. Merit engineers are reviewing the logs and events leading up to the problem. Once they are able to gather the information Merit will work with the equipment vendor to determine if it was a hardware or software problem on the core router.

Connecting to the greater Internet was fully restored and operational as of 4:52 AM ET. All Merit Members should not be experiencing any network problems connecting to the Internet. If a Merit Member is experiencing a network or service issue, please contact the Merit Support Center immediately at 734-527-5700.

Once Merit engineers are able to determine the core cause of the problem a more detailed report will be sent out to all Merit Members.

About Merit Network

Merit Network Inc., is a nonprofit corporation owned and governed by Michigan's public universities, owns and operates America's longest-running regional research and education network. In 1966, Michigan's public universities created Merit as a shared resource to help meet their common need for networking assistance. Since its formation, Merit Network has remained on the forefront of research and education networking expertise and services. Merit provides high-performance networking and IT solutions to Michigan's public universities, colleges, K-12 organizations, libraries, state government, healthcare, and other non-profit organizations.