SWANSEA University students were angry to be left without access to revision materials after Blackboard crashed twice during the exam period.
The service was down for almost a day in each case.
The university said the first outage was due to a malfunction in the SQL database service and said the second was caused by a Microsoft Windows Update that caused the server to crash.
Swansea University Students’ Union Education Officer, Zahid Raja, said, “Students anywhere in the UK expect their university to provide a reliable service through which students can access their lecture notes to revise. We are no different in Swansea.
“The university Blackboard team works hard to keep things running, however, outages regarding learning resources are unacceptable during assessment periods.
“I will be meeting with the university to discuss how we can work together to set up a 24 hour contact point that students can use to report disruptions.”
The university issued an assurance that the two events were not linked, and that they took the reliability of this and other core services very seriously.
