March 31 marked the beginning of course enrollment for the Summer and Fall terms. Unfortunately, my.SMU experienced technical difficulties this week impacting the enrollment experience. We wanted to provide more details about the outage and our efforts to resolve the issue.
Last year, we received complaints of occasional slowness during the enrollment process. In order to address the issue for 2025, we engaged a vendor to review and assess critical changes to the my.SMU environment. Based on their recommendations, several changes were made, including installing additional servers to help handle the dramatic increase in traffic. This project and all changes were completed recently. We conducted tests following the changes and believed we were well positioned for this year, although we were unable to simulate the exact performance load experienced during enrollment.
As enrollment began on March 31, we saw a brief impact to the environment which lasted a few minutes. Enrollment continued without issue over the next several days. However, on April 8, 2025, around 12:30 p.m., campus began experiencing critical performance issues with my.SMU. During our troubleshooting, we noticed a significant number of login sessions that were overloading the my.SMU environment. Working with our teams and several vendors to analyze the system, we made a series of changes over the course of three days. With each set of changes, the system would stabilize for awhile but the problem continued to return until the last changes were made at 9 a.m. on April 10. Since that time, the system has been performing well and we are receiving the expected number of successful enrollments.
While we are not convinced we have identified the root cause, the system is stable and students are able to enroll. Our teams continue to review and analyze the traffic to identify the core problem in order to avoid disruption in the future. We want to apologize for the inconvenience and frustration caused during this critical time, and are grateful for your patience as we worked to resolve the issue.
Enrollment remains open for any student whose enrollment appointment has already occurred. If you encounter any issues, please contact the IT Help Desk.
