No hacker attack - the climate wasn't great

It had never happened before - Leuphana went offline late on Friday afternoon. A failure in the air conditioning system caused the university server room to overheat. Temperatures of up to 50 degrees were measured at times. The temperature in devices was even as high as 65 degrees. The enormous heat caused the fibre channel switches and hard disk systems in particular to fail. The risk plan for such cases took effect immediately. The website was back online by around 11.00 pm on Saturday night. Now all other services are gradually returning.

Timo Leder, Head of IT and Media Technology at Leuphana University, announced on Saturday morning: "After the servers were shut down, the priority was to secure the structure and data - it is now clear that there is no loss of IT structures, data, content or services." An external attack has also been ruled out. Leder continues: "The server room in the data centre in Building 7 was literally at desert temperatures - the reasons for the incident are being intensively analysed by the building management team."

The night was long for the IT team, so that the central services were quickly available again. These included the locking system, which is important for campus security, various central servers and the research information system, which is important for researchers. E-mails are also available again.

However, the reorganisation may take until Monday. Christian Brei, Full-time Vice President of Leuphana, describes the incident as a stroke of luck. "The IT gods seem to have been kind to us: experience shows that traffic across all services decreases significantly towards the weekend. What's more, it wasn't an external attack that all universities are worried about. And thanks to our risk management, we are quickly returning to normality."

In future, Leuphana will be even better protected on the flank of its IT infrastructure. The establishment of a second data centre has already been completed and is currently in test operation. Some final services are still missing, so that "complete redundancy" can only be ensured in the near future. "This duplication of all IT structures and content is the prerequisite for being able to cope well with any cybercrime attacks and technical failures," assures Timo Leder with an optimistic view of the future.