New York’s embattled Columbia University is scrambling to restore system access for thousands of students and faculty on Tuesday after being hit with a suspected cyberattack.
Columbia’s internal network went down at about 7:00 a.m. Eastern Time, according to the university’s daily paper, The Columbia Spectator, which said the school is now working with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to investigate the case.
The “widespread system outages” were first reported by the Columbia University Information Technology (CUIT) department at around 7:30 a.m. in an email blast sent out to all students and faculty.
Reports of at least one television screen at one of the dorms on Columbia’s Morningside campus displayed a picture of US President Donald Trump, the Spectator said.
An earlier claim of responsibility by an unnamed hacker group has since been discredited by Columbia officials.
According to the Spectator, a Columbia spokesperson told the paper it was “aware of online posts from a group claiming responsibility for this outage,” later releasing a statement that the claim was unfounded.
So far, the NYPD has not provided any additional information about the outage or the hacker claims.
The spokesperson wrote that the University’s IT teams are “investigating the situation alongside law enforcement and working towards a solution to restore services as quickly as possible.”
The last day of classes for Columbia’s roughly 34,000 students and over 7,000 faculty members ended the first week of May, although the private Ivy League school has hundreds of summer courses and research programs currently in session.
The network outage is said to be impacting Columbia’s UNI login authentication service for students and affiliates, the university’s LionMail email service, and its online student-teacher assignment platform, CourseWorks.
In another CUIT email sent just after 10:00 a.m., students were told to stay logged into the system to retain access, while faculty were told to bring their lesson plans to classes on USB drives.
Located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the school has been front and center in the news since the October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel, with months-long pro-Palestinian demonstrations causing the school to eventually have to forcibly remove students who barricaded themselves in the now infamous Hamilton Hall, located on the same Morningside campus.
The University has also garnered the ire of the Trump administration, which has since detained one of the activist leaders of the demonstrations, Mahmoud Khalil, for inciting terrorism and anti-Semitism on campus, and has threatened to withhold 400 million in federal funding due to accusations regarding the school's lackluster response to the disruptive chaos.
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