Incident Summary
From approximately 3:41 p.m. to 3:51 p.m. on Tuesday, April 14, 2015, multiple Georgia State University buildings experienced a loss of utility power due to a power outage that affected the university’s electricity provider, Georgia Power. After power was restored, most services became available immediately in affected buildings. However, for a few buildings, wireless access remained unavailable as power was reset to local wireless controllers. By 4:35 p.m., wireless service had been restored to all buildings. The loss of power also impacted the availability of some additional campus services (including DegreeWorks and the GIL automated library system). All additional services, except GIL, were returned to service on April 14. Outstanding issues relating to the GIL system were escalated to the vendor, and full functionality was restored to the the system on April 16.

Incident Cause
When utility power was restored after the power outage, a main building circuit breaker tripped, which interrupted power to some Data Center devices. The breaker was reset, and protected utility power was systematically restored to affected technical systems.

Incident Response Measures
On April 18, IS&T and Facilities engaged an electrical engineering contractor to adjust the main breaker configuration settings, in order to prevent a recurrence in the event of a future outage. We also continue to investigate and pursue additional measures to improve the stability and availability of the IT and electrical services provided to campus.