Many key UO online services including Blackboard will be down between 7:00pm PDT Friday, June 20 until 7:00am Saturday, June 21 PDT so that Information Services can upgrade equipment vital to offering services.
For more information please see the following web page:
Update: The maintenance has been completed.
There will be a short maintenance period this Saturday May 24 from 8am-10am. There will be no downtime during this period.
During this time there will be three updates installed. The first is a fix in the Assessment feature that will fix a problem with the multiple blanks question type when “Exact Match” is used. The second is an update to the Retention Center to prevent some blocking locks in the database. The final is a fix to SafeAssign to allow the originality reports to open in a full window.
Update: The maintenance has been completed.
There will be some minor maintenance on Blackboard on Saturday May 17 from 8am to 10pm. During this time a patch will be installed that will allow instructors using Firefox 29 and Chrome 34 to import test questions into a question pool.
No downtime is expected for this update.
SafeAssign will be undergoing maintenance on Saturday April 26, 2014 from 7am-9am PDT. During the first half hour students will not be able to upload SafeAssignments. After 7:30am they will be able to upload assignments but originality reports for them won’t be generated for them until after the maintenance is complete. After the maintenance the Originality Report will have a new look:
Click here for the release notes for SafeAssign.
The original Bulletin follows:
Bulletin/Advisory Information:
The SafeAssign central services will undergo maintenance that requires a service outage on Saturday, April 26, 2014 10am – 12pm US Eastern (GMT -4). For the first half hour, SafeAssign functionality will not be available and an error will be displayed to the user. For the remainder of the maintenance window, papers will not be processed. Papers submitted during this maintenance window will be queued, and reports will be delayed until after the maintenance has completed.
Immediately after this deployment has completed, users will experience a new look and feel on their originality reports. Please refer to the Release Notes for more detailed information about this deployment on April 26th, 2014.
When internet fraudsters impersonate a business to trick you into giving out your personal information, it’s called phishing. Don’t reply to email, text, or pop-up messages that ask for your personal or financial information. Don’t click on links within them either—even if the message seems to be from an organization you trust. Delete the email immediately. Some students have received phishing emails that look like they came from Blackboard. Login to Blackboard and go to that class page, which is the safest way to see new content.
Phishing scams use fraudulent emails to get users to reveal confidential information. Such emails usually look like they come from a legitimate organization such as Blackboard but contain links to illegitimate sites. Blackboard has become aware of a mass phishing scam targeting customers using Blackboard Learn. To be clear, Blackboard Learn has not been hacked — these are emails sent directly from a spammer to emails it may have harvested by spidering the institution’s websites for email addresses. More information on Phishing scams can be found on the Information Security website at: http://security.uoregon.edu/node/37.html
Below are sample emails:
Example 1: “Blackboard Article Alert”
| Purported Sender | School Articles <articles@www.blackboard.org> |
| Spoofed Origin Email | School Articles <articles@www.blackboard.org> |
| Email Subject | Blackboard Article Alert |
| Content | Hello,Your school has uploaded an article with your information tagged in the content.Please sign in immediately to review your information.Click here to sign in and review the article now
Comment/Notifications of articles that are published will be delivered to you. Black board Articles. |
Example 2: “New Course Information”
| Purported Sender | Blackboard Learn <notifications@blackboard.com> |
| Spoofed Origin Email | Blackboard Learn <notifications@blackboard.com> |
| Email Subject | New Course Information |
| Content | Good Morning,An important course form has been posted to you through the Blackboard Learning System.Please sign in immediately to view the form.Click here to sign in <–Link to malicious websiteThank you,Blackboard Learn. |
Example 3: “Blackboard Learn: Important New Course”
| Purported Sender | Blackboard Learn <email@blackboard.com> |
| Spoofed Origin Email | Blackboard Learn <email@blackboard.com> |
| Email Subject | Blackboard Learn : Important new course |
| Content | Dear Staffs/StudentsAccess to e-mail is about to expire, We recommend that you upgrade your account to avoid the suspension.Please click on the link below to re-activate your account, please sign in to Blackboard system immediately.Click here to sign in to the Blackboard System <–Link to malicious websiteThank You. © 2013 Blackboard | Technology and Solutions Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
Example 4: “Notice: Important New Courses Alert.”
| Purported Sender | Blackboard Learn <email@blackboard.com> |
| Spoofed Origin Email | Blackboard Learn <email@blackboard.com> |
| Email Subject | Blackboard Learn : Important new course |
| Content | Dear MemberAccess to e-mail is about to expire, We recommend that you upgrade your account to avoid the suspension.Please click on the link below to re-activate your account, please sign in to Blackboard system immediately.Click here to sign in to the Blackboard System <–Link to malicious websiteThank You. © 2013 Blackboard | Technology and Solutions Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
The maintenance on the Blackboard servers is now complete. During the maintenance Cumulative Patch 3 was installed along with some updated building blocks. One of these updates was to fix most of the paste from Word/Office into Blackboard.
There was no downtime during this maintenance.
There will be some Blackboard maintenance on March 27 from 8am until 12pm. During this time some patches will be installed. There will be no user interface changes and no downtime is expected although there may be some system slowness during the maintenance.
UO Libraries and Information Services will be making emergency changes at 12:00pm noon and again at 5pm today, Tuesday, 3/4/14, to Blackboard’s storage system. Although we do not anticipate any downtime for Blackboard, please be aware that there is a heightened possibility of downtime around these times.
We experienced an unexpected outage Monday, 3/3/14 from 11:55am-12:05pm. Blackboard is back up and working smoothly. There might be slight performance issues due to ongoing hardware maintenance.
Thank you for your patience.
Update: the maintenance is now complete. There was no downtime during the maintenance. If you have any problems with SafeAssign please try to clear your cache and make sure that your browser is set to allow cookies from third party sites.
There will be some brief maintenance done on Saturday February 15 from 8am until 9am. During this time the latest updates to SafeAssign will be installed. The SafeAssign service will be unavailable for a brief time during this maintenance. The rest of the Blackboard services will not be affected by this.