UPDATE 5:10 AM Thursday From Pittsburg State Chief Information Officer Angela Neria
We just received word (3:15 am) from KanREN that the crews working through the night have restored the broken path from PSU to Kansas City. This means that we now have IT services restored through that 1 path. They expect the 2nd path to be complete within a few hours.
We have tested multiple services and feel comfortable saying that things look good to proceed with using PSU IT services. However, please note that there is still "finish work" in the field being completed so there is a possibility of interruption, although slight.
A huge thanks to the KanREN team and all of the folks working in the cold tonight to bring services back online for us and many others across Kansas. We appreciate your patience and kind messages during this unusual and extremely poorly timed outage.
THIS STORY HAS BEEN UPDATED
KanREN, the internet service provider to PSU and many other regional institutions, went down today when fiber links were cut between Pittsburg and Kansas City and Pittsburg and Wichita.
The issue is currently impacting PSU, the City of Pittsburg, Pittsburg USD 250, Frontenac USD 249, Fort Scott Community College, Fort Scott USD 234, Central Burden USD 462, Prairie View USD 362, Linn County Library.
PSU has a full ring network for redundancy through KanREN — one link to Kansas City and one to Wichita — to ensure redundancy.
“The only time this ring would not work is if both links to Kansas City and Wichita are down at the same time, and that’s what’s happening now,” said Angela Neria, chief information officer for PSU. “This has not happened since the ring was put into place over a decade ago, and it unfortunately happened during finals week for our students. Truly a perfect storm.”
Crews are working to resolve the issue.