Banner Slowness/Unavailablility

Update timeline

1. investigating Aug 10, 2026, 07:02 PM UTC

   We have received reports that Banner is currently experiencing issues. The OIT EAS team is currently investigating, and we will be making updates at 1-hour intervals. A functioning workaround has been identified: open a private or incognito browser window to access Banner. If the site is still slow/not loading, close and open another new private or incognito window; it may take a few attempts, but once a reliable connection is made, you can continue to use that session until the issue is resolved! Thank you for your patience during the resolution of this issue!

2. monitoring Aug 10, 2026, 08:03 PM UTC

   The OIT EAS team has identified the issue with the Banner and has implemented a fix, which is being monitored for effectiveness and stability. Thank you again for your patience during the resolution of this issue! You can expect further updates at the end of the business day 5:00PM or as new information becomes available.

3. resolved Aug 17, 2026, 04:53 PM UTC

   The OIT EAS team has resolved the issue with the Banner, and confirmed the fix to be stable. Issue was resolved on Aug 10th. Please report any continued issues with this service to your campus's IT helpdesk, and thank you again for your patience during the resolution of this issue!

4. postmortem Aug 26, 2026, 06:27 PM UTC

   Banner Employee Service Unresponsive Problem Impact Analysis Event Occurrence: August 10, 2026 10:30am to 10:53am # Background The Banner Employee Self Service application is the main service that employees submit timesheets, view their leave balances, and similar items related to their employment across the University of Alaska System. The vendor Ellucian hosts the University Banner and Banner Self Service instances and is responsible for ensuring their availability through monitoring and corrective actions. # Break Down of the Problem At approximately 10:35am the UAF NTS Service Desk reached out to Banner team in Slack to inform them about reports of extreme slowness in Banner. A brief review revealed that only the Employee Self Service module was encountering issues. The Service Desk recommended a work around of trying an incognito browser, which worked for some. The EAS team reached out to Ellucian and created a P1 ticket. The service began functioning again as expected at approximately 10:53am. # Target State / Goal All components of Banner and Banner Self Service should be available with the expectations of the daily maintenance window and other scheduled outage times. # Root Cause Analysis The Ellucian cloud team which was engaged during restoration shared the following related to this event. Review of their monitoring showed that a performance degradation started at 10:42am and became fully unavailable at 10:50am. The automation related to the containers completed a successful start up at 10:53am and by 10:57am Employee Self Service fully stabilized. Ellucian did not evaluate any further related to cause of the outage. The EAS team is aware of a product defect in the Banner Employee Self Service software that was shown to cause this sort of event, first experienced in March and April of this year related to a product defect that has yet to be corrected in production, but is scheduled for application. # Develop Countermeasures To resolve this for the future, we expect that applying the recent defect resolution fix will correct this issue. # Implementation of Countermeasures September 12-13, 2026: Deploy Banner related upgrades that resolve the identified defects. # Follow Up / Review September 14, 2026: Validate upgrades for resolution were deployed.