Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support independent student journalism. Support independent student journalism. Support independent student journalism.
The Dartmouth
July 11, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Blitz lockout leads to new procedure

The six-hour lockout from Microsoft Office 365 on May 1 affected users across many campus departments and led to the development of new problem escalation procedures at Microsoft, according to a report from Dartmouth Computing Services. The lockout demonstrates potential issues with the College's use of an externally hosted communications system, according to students.

The lockout occurred when Dartmouth's Active Directory Federation Service which helps establish the trusted relationship and federation between Dartmouth and Microsoft's external servers prematurely created a certificate unrecognizable to Microsoft servers, resulting in Microsoft's rejection of any Dartmouth user connections to the Blitz system, according to Chief Information Offier and Vice President for Information Technology Ellen Waite-Franzen.

On Wednesday, Computing Services created email accounts for members of the Class of 2016.

While a message was sent alerting incoming students that they could access their email, the process of licensing the accounts in the cloud and provisioning the accounts took several hours, according to Waite-Franzen.

"Next year, we will be sure to let the incoming students know that their mailboxes may not be accessible immediately," Waite-Franzen said.

Glitches with email systems that utilize external servers are not uncommon, according to Galen Pospisil '13, who works in computing services and has served on various Blitz-2-Blitz transition committees.

Computing Services works with Microsoft to maximize Office 365 accessibility for Dartmouth users, Associate Director for Institutional Information Systems and Services Susan Zaslaw said in an email to The Dartmouth.

The extended period of Blitz system inaccessibility on May 1 affected students, faculty and certain staff departments.

"I believe Microsoft's response should have been faster given that we had identified to them what we believed was the source of the problem," Waite-Franzen said.

Dartmouth Computing Services has asked Microsoft to change its problem escalation process in order to avoid future delays, according to a report published by Computing Services.

"The issue is that the certificates were renewed but were not accepted," Waite-Franzen said. "Microsoft now has a process in place that we will use for certificate renewals in the future."

The ADFS certificate was mistakenly created three weeks prior to its scheduled May 15 expiration date. When the certificate went into effect on May 1, Microsoft was unable to recognize and did not accept any connections coming from the non-verified certificate.

During the six-hour lockout, Dartmouth users could not access any Microsoft Online Services products.

"It's certainly a huge thing for staff because we're so used to it in our daily work flow," physics and astronomy professor Brian Chaboyer, who previously chaired the Council on Computing, said. "We're all using it for communication, but I think professors use it for more world-related issues, where students are sending more chatting emails."

Users who had logged on to Blitz prior to 8 a.m. or those who forward their email to other addresses continued to have access throughout the day.

"During the lockout, one of my professors, who was still on the old [system], was completely unaffected," Pospisil said.

Students relying on email rather than Facebook and texting for rapid communication were particularly affected by the outage, according to Emilie Weed '13, who also served on a Blitz-2-Blitz transition committee.

"It's like our lifelines, so when it is missing, I feel like most of the student body is out of luck," Weed said.

Hinman Mail Center's package alert email notification was not affected, as the emails are sent through a non-Dartmouth server, according to Postmaster Karen Hautaniemi.

The center, however, was unable to receive incoming emails.

Dartmouth's problems with Microsoft's servers constitute a new obstacle, since all components of the old BlitzMail system were located on campus, according to Pospisil.

"Not only did we have our own email system, but we wrote our own software for it," he said. "Office 365 is a relatively new service in general, so it's been a learning process for both parties."

The new Blitz system also experienced two unrelated incidents in the past week.

On Tuesday, the spam service Spamhaus tagged an email server at Microsoft, according to Waite-Franzen.

"Mail from that server was being denied by other mail servers which use Spamhaus," she said.

Emails to people with addresses at domains other than Dartmouth were likely put in the trash folder, according to Chaboyer. Many emails sent to off-campus recipients from Dartmouth accounts were flagged as spam.

Dan Scholnick '00 who developed The Basement, the first web-based application for BlitzMail said Microsoft Outlook lacks the simplicity and efficiency that characterized the old system.

"I would sit in the dorm room, across the hall from friends, and instead of talking to each other, we would be blitzing back and forth, much the same way that kids use text messaging," he said.

Microsoft Outlook's other features such as HTML-friendly emails, a 25-gigabyte mailbox size and Lync, a component that allows instant messaging, voice and video chats and desktop sharing make it an attractive service, according to Zaslaw. An awareness campaign for Lync will take place this summer.

"Individuals benefit differently from the new features that Office 365 offers depending upon how they access and use the system," she said.