Mohnke’s case was not an isolated incident, as the Internet connection at nearly every public university in Michigan was disrupted early Wednesday morning from about midnight to 5 a.m.

The disturbances resulted from a router issue within Merit Network, the Internet service provider, or ISP, that supplies Internet to public educational institutions across the state, including MSU.

Elwood Downing, the vice president of member relations, communications and services for Merit, said an information trafficking problem within a router in Chicago, caused Merit’s greater-Internet system to go down. After engineers identified the problem and rerouted the packets to another router, the Internet was back up at 4:52 a.m. Wednesday, he said.

“It’s like, if you open up the refrigerator, it’s on, it’s working, it’s cold. And (then again), you open it up, and everything’s running and it’s warm,” he said. “We had to literally transfer the traffic from that router to another one.”

Since this was an ISP problem and not an MSU problem, MSU could do nothing, MSU spokesman Jason Cody said. MSU IT Services responds to issues with MSU’s Internet.

“It was an issue with our ISP,” Cody said. “(If) your Internet provider at home goes down, you have to wait until your ISP gets the problem rectified.”

In many of her classes, Mohnke uses email to correspond with professors and ANGEL to keep on track of assignments, she said.

She said MSU was lucky this disruption happened at a time when most students and faculty members were asleep. If a blackout like this were to occur during the day, she said she could see some disruptions across campus.

“There might be panic among the students, but (if) it was only down for a couple of hours, it might not be too severe,” she said. “But … five hours like it was last night — that’s a pretty long time.”

During the day, Downing said Merit has engineers on hand who could attend to an issue, although they would have to approach it in a differently because the Internet traffic is much higher during the day than it is at night.

In the past 20 years, Downing said this was the second disruption of its sort, with the likelihood of it happening again very slim.

Steve Johnson, a writing, rhetoric and American cultures assistant professor, said the effects could be damaging if a similar incident happened during the day. For these instances, he has a contingency plan for operating for Internet disturbances he discusses with students, he said.

“It’s also the professor’s responsibility to anticipate that this can happen and to have a discussion,”
Johnson said.