Support News

Blackboard Collaborate - Intermittent Service Issue (~9/22 - 9/25/14)

Posted: 2014-09-24 12:44:13   Expiration: 2014-10-03 18:00:00

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2014-09-24 12:44:13. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

Users may experience issues with the Blackboard Collaborate service starting on Monday, September 22. Users may be unable to connect, drop out of sessions, or encounter problems with performance. The vendor confirmed that they are experiencing intermittent issues related to a Distributed Denial of Service attacks. This news item will be updated when we have more information to report. In the meantime, you check the availability of the service on the vendor provided web site (link). Select the title of this news item for an official announcement from Blackboard.

We regret the impact that this intermittent issue may cause.


Announcement from Blackboard (7:30 a.m., September 25, 2014)
The Blackboard Collaborate service for customers hosted out of our US datacenter has been experiencing intermittent issues over the last few days related to multiple targeted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Users may have experienced some issues connecting to their Collaborate sessions during this time.

It’s important to note that at no time have our systems been compromised nor has the Collaborate application failed. Rather, network congestion caused by the DDoS attempts has prevented our community from enjoying typical levels of performance.

While we have multiple systems in place (both hardware and software) to prevent DDoS attacks from disabling our service, the magnitude of the attacks this week are larger than we have experienced in the past. While the attacks did not bring our service down, they unfortunately were significant enough to disrupt the Collaborate experience for our customers.

We have put additional safeguards in place this week to secure our systems even further against these larger scale attacks. We continue to refine our configurations as necessary so that when these attacks do occur, they are mitigated quickly and without disruption to normal activity.


-- Blackboard Collaborate Service Team