University of Alaska experienced a minor incident on November 3, 2025 affecting UAOnline and Banner 9, lasting 1d 1h. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- monitoring Nov 04, 2025, 05:10 PM UTC
CORRECTION: Current issues with Banner are not related to the OS Patch last weekend; automation tools should be fully functional! Users are reporting intermittent errors in Banner, and OIT Enterprise Applications Services is aware and communicating with the vendor about a resolution. Due to the gradual recovery since last night, we are considering this outage to be in a 'monitoring' state. We will make another update as new information becomes available, and at end-of-day today (5:00PM AKST).
- resolved Nov 05, 2025, 05:59 PM UTC
We apologize for the delay in reporting! OIT EAS reports that all issues with Banner have been resolved, and confirmed as much with the vendor. Thank you so much for your time and patience as we followed this resolution!
- postmortem Nov 19, 2025, 07:25 PM UTC
Banner Service Degradation Problem Impact Analysis Event Occurrence: November 3, 2025 3pm to 6pm # Background Banner is the university’s Enterprise Resource Planning \(ERP\) system and handles both manual and automated transactions across the spectrum of the university’s business. UAOnline is the University branded Banner self service portal. Banner and UAOnline are hosted by the vendor Ellucian also the maker of the product. Ellucian pre-schedules Operating System patches for production on the first weekend of every month. App Manager is an automation tool that facilitates the execution of frequently run reports and import related to Banner. # Break Down of the Problem At approximately 7:58am on November Service Desk staff inquired about a report of someone not being able to print a Finance related form. At that time the Banner team noticed that a significant number of jobs were pending from the previous weekend in App Manager. The Banner team put in a high priority ticket with the vendor related to App Manager not connecting correctly. The vendor reset the App Manager program and jobs that had stacked up all were attempting to execute at the same time starting around noon. Further reports of banner slowness started to come in at approximately 3pm. # Target State / Goal The Banner and UAOnline services should be available 24 hours a day 7 days a week with the exception of scheduled and planned down time. The system should always be responsive. # Root Cause Analysis In discussion with the vendor, when the Production OS patching was being applied, the responsible technician had failed to follow the defined standard operating procedure after the patches were applied, which caused the jobs to stack up. When the application manager job started to run, they were consuming a large number of resources in the database, preventing common use of the banner application. # Develop Countermeasures * _Follow up with the vendor to report the issue and correct behavior on the team completing the work._ # Implementation of Countermeasures November 11, 2025 - Follow up with vendors to share expectations of improving this process for those completing the work. # Follow Up / Review November 12, 2025 - Vendor was asked to follow up on their staff following the SOP for this routine maintenance.