July 28, 2010
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The Website is Down: Athens and Calhoun Report outages, Williams Suspected in Monopolistic Act
Both the Calhoun Website and the Athens State website are currently down, coming on the heels of this article which states that Calhoun has “more than 11,300 students” and “is the largest community college in the state.”Athens State is hosted by Alabama Supercomputer; Calhoun’s hosting is unknown.
Athens State has issued a statement to their enrolled students via email stating,
Alabama Super Computer Authority is experiencing an outage due to a cut line. This will cause a loss of access to some university resources. They currently do not have an estimated time until the line is repaired. We will keep you updated as we hear more from them.1There have been two theories floated as to the outage.The first theory states that either or both of the websites are down because parents and potential students are flocking to these schools to avoid paying the draconian tuition and sundry fees at UAH. Because these websites have received so much traffic, they could not handle the volume and so an effective Denial of Service attack has been waged against their servers as current and potential students flock to their websites.
A second theory being floated is that Dr. David B. Williams, President of UAH has paid someone to cut the lines to competing schools, thus marring the competition’s public image (why send your kids to a school that can’t keep their website up and running) while simultaneously being the only school with available online resources during this time of crisis.
Like Athens State, we’ll keep you updated as we know more.
1 Athen State’s email was sent with an iPhone. No word on whether this iPhone was an iPhone 4G, how Antenna-gate affected the transmission or reception of emails nor whether AT&T’s network could handle the sudden influx of email traffic.
Comments (3)
I’m glad you’ve given up your dreams of journalism. Might I suggest you also give up blogging? WHO is floating these “theories?” HOW did you hear about them? Honestly, you haven’t convinced me of any motivation of President Williams being behind this “monopolistic act.” Just because I’m popular, does not give me motive for hurting other people who threaten that popularity. I don’t understand how you managed to tie any of this together from the originating article.
@ehowton - Williams isn’t popular; in fact, he’s notorious.
Under William’s command, tuition at UAH has increased asymptotically. Williams has engaged in less than questionable partnerships and has introduced inane policies and even violated copyright laws with the UAH website.
Wow! I see a moron.
What is worse is that he probably believes himself.