AUCKLAND (Stuff / Pacific Media Watch): Auckland University and AUT University staff and students - including at New Zealand's largest and most new media savvy journalism school - have been forced back to pen and paper because of an information technology outage today.
Paul Matthews, chief executive of the Institute for Information Technology Professionals, said all of Auckland University's IT services had been knocked offline by a power failure at the university's main datacentre.
He questioned why backup systems did not kick in.
The university's external relations office manager, Pramilla Andrew, confirmed there was a problem with the university's IT systems but was unable to transfer calls to staff with more information.
The university's main switchboard number was this afternoon playing a recorded message that informed callers the university was experiencing "system problem" [sic] and then cut off calls.
The fault also affected the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), whose systems are hosted by Auckland University's datacentre.
Its main website and the journalism programme websites, including the Pacific Media Centre, were offline this afternoon.
Auckland University, New Zealand's oldest, has 41,000 students.
It was last year ranked as the country's seventh largest IT user by technology magazine MIS, based on its number of computers.
Auckland University of Technology is the country's youngest university and has 27,000 students.
On Friday evening, Prime Minister John Key is due to officially open AUT's Sir Paul Reeves Building, which houses a state-of-the-art convergence media centre for the School of Communication Studies, which has more than 1000 students on its journalism, radio, television, digital and other media programmes.
Auckland University's datacentre also hosts IT servers for a range of New Zealand companies.
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Pacific Media Watch
