As hundreds of students were left without access to their UCD Connect accounts, News Editor Beth Clifford investigates who or what was behind this.
Multiple UCD students report being left in the dark by the university after they were logged out of their UCD Connect accounts from 23 October without being informed by UCD as to why or how. Around 500 UCD Connect accounts were impacted, leaving hundreds of students logged out of, and unable to access, essential applications such as their UCD email, Brightspace, calendar, SISWeb and Google drive.
Several UCD students have provided a comment for The University Observer stating that they realised between Thursday 23 October and Friday 24 October that they could not login to their UCD Connect accounts. When trying to contact UCD’s IT services to resolve this issue, students were subsequently unable to book an appointment with them because it would require already having access to their UCD Connect account.
According to one student, while they were on their way into UCD on the Thursday morning, upon trying to see what room their class was in that day, they noticed their calendar was completely empty. They then tried to check their email account only to realise that they had been logged out of that too. This student says that when they tried to login, the webpage repeatedly stated that their password was incorrect despite them inputting the correct password.
After a few hours, the student managed to change their password for their account. They went on to say that “UCD have not notified me as to why or how that happened” and that being logged out of UCD Connect resulted in a “very stressful morning” for them.
In comments made by two other students, they discovered upon trying to use their UCD Connect accounts on Thursday morning that they were unable to do so as they too had been logged out. These two students resorted to phone calling UCD’s IT Services in order to contact them for help and advice. Both students claimed that during these phone calls they were told that IT Services knew, one day prior, that students would be logged out of their accounts, yet did not contact the students that were to be affected.
From these phone calls, both students were given help in regaining access to their accounts by changing their passwords. However, neither student was contacted following the update of their passwords to confirm that their accounts were secure.
The two students relayed their frustrations with the IT Services lack of urgency in alerting people that their UCD Connect login would be inoperative. Another student recalls that they only realised their account was not working on Friday 24 October, and so they were not able to contact the IT Services until Monday 27 October. As a result this student missed an essay deadline.
The University Observer reached out to the UCD IT Services for a comment on the situation. IT Services explained that the forced change of passwords was to “ensure increased security and lower the risk of any accounts being compromised”. They clarified that none of the accounts that were logged out were flagged as actually being compromised.
In the same comment, IT Services took accountability for not providing an advisory notice to students, which would include instructions and the steps users could take to further protect their accounts. In not informing people before and after the password change, as they typically would, they stated that, “this was an error on our part”. To correct their error, IT Services are preparing to send a follow-up email to the students who have been impacted by the forced password change.