UM returns to the World Wide Web after alleged cyberattack

The University of Michigan is back online after a mysterious cyber incident took down the campus’s internet and wi-fi systems.

The saga started Aug. 27, when the school’s IT department announced a temporary internet outage that prevented students and faculty from using the internet and cloud-connected university services like Google, Canvas, and email across three campuses.

The outage occurred the day before fall semester classes began, and it appears that school security staff actually pulled the plug to isolate the campuses from a “significant security concern.”

“Our Information Assurance team, in partnership with leading cybersecurity service providers, detects, deflects, and mitigates a steady stream of malicious actors every hour of every day,” UM security executives wrote in a joint statement. “After careful evaluation of a significant security concern, we made the intentional decision to sever our ties to the internet. We took this action to provide our information technology teams the space required to address the issue in the safest possible manner.”

The disruption forced students—who generally still attended classes—to use their cell phones or go off campus to use the internet, CNN reported. But the increased mobile traffic jammed cellular networks, according to MLive.

The paper noted that UM IT staff were having “a bad day” Monday. They eventually cleared students and faculty to access services like Google, Zoom, and Slack on off-campus networks and devices, and the school announced its network was back online as of Wednesday morning.

The mystery of what actually happened, however, hasn’t been solved. A regent told the Detroit News that the school experienced a targeted cyberattack, but the university won’t say more publicly.

“The investigative work into the security issue continues, and we are not able to share any information that might compromise the investigation,” the school’s president and chief information officer said in a joint statement Aug. 30.

Higher-ed institutions are no strangers to cyberattacks. UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine temporarily lost access to some of its servers in a 2020 malware attack and paid a $1.1 million ransom. Others, like Illinois’s Lincoln College, never recover. The historically Black institution shuttered last year, citing a cyberattack that curtailed enrollment as one of its last straws.