Go.uhcl experiences issues the first week of fall semester

UHCL’s single sign-on service go.uhcl.edu experienced a denial of service attack Aug. 22, the first day of classes for many UHCL students. A denial of service attack is accomplished by flooding its target with so much information that it begins to fail and is unable to operate. 

The Go.UHCL service is provided through QuickLaunch which allows users to sign in once to access their multiple UHCL accounts and services like Blackboard and Zoom without having to log in multiple times.  

A campus-wide email was sent out Aug. 23 by LeeBrian Gaskins, senior associate vice president for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer alerting students, staff and faculty to the issue.. The email said the issue affected several higher education institutions, including Texas A&M International University, Alabama State University, and Colorado Christian University.

“Around 8 [a.m.] Monday morning we noticed that the response time was slow,” Gaskins said. “We reached out to QuickLaunch, which is our provider and they didn’t really know what was going on.”

Students trying to access Go.UHCL during its outage were directed to a webpage explaining the situation.

QuickLaunch reported the issue to be resolved on Aug 23. Go.UHCL was not fully reinstated until Aug. 29.

The service’s outages affected UHCL students, staff and faculty, causing disruptions for class. 

“Being unable to access go.uhcl.edu and Blackboard made it challenging to start the semester, especially for those of us teaching online classes,” said Christine Walther, faculty senate president and associate professor of Psychology. “The solutions provided by OIT addressed most of the challenges, but it would have been nice if they were available, or communicated about, sooner. I think other faculty were frustrated by the situation, but, based on past problems, they also expect things like this to happen at some point during the semester.”

Students had mixed feelings about Go.UHCL’s outage.

“Although it was a frustrating situation that the Go.UHCL system was down and students could not access blackboard, we appreciate the efforts made by OIT to address and restore access and would also like to thank the UHCL faculty for their flexibility and leniency during the outage,” said Joe Contreras Student Government President “As the Student Government executive council, we would like to assure students that we will continue to do our part in communicating student concerns to the appropriate departments.” 

Go.UHCL was implemented Feb. 1, 2022, and was touted as a cloud-based identity & access management solution that would serve as a hub for all student staff and faculty needs. 

Go.UHCL has experienced issues in the past year since its implementation. On April 13 and May 3 Go.UHCL experienced outages. Both dates corresponded with midterms and finals weeks respectively.

BlackboardDenial of Service attackgo.uhclLeeBrian GaskinsQuickLaunch
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