The University of Illinois at Chicago recently found itself living a modern nightmare: Google’s automated cybersecurity regime mistook the university as the culprit in a spam attack on the university’s students and began blocking university email accounts from sending messages to Gmail users.
The blocking went on for more than two weeks, and the affected Gmail users included 13,000 of the university’s own students. University officials describe those two weeks as a Kafkaesque state of limbo.
On March 27, 12 days after Google blacklisted the university’s domain, university officials wrote on an academic computing blog: “We have followed the instructions they have posted online on how to resolve this issue, but there is no indication on what happens once they receive the request.”
“Experience from other sites that have encountered this issue range from days to weeks,” the officials wrote. “The only recourse is to wait until they stop blacklisting uic.edu, which happens on its own, but not on a set schedule.”
Google officials told The Chronicle on Monday that the issue had now been resolved. But the university’s two-week struggle highlights the hazards that come with relying on an outside company—especially one that depends heavily on automated processes—to deliver messages to students. For complete post see here
