Category Archives: News

Turnitin Service Disruption

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This from Turnitin at 20:00 on the 12th of August:

“Incident resolved

Due to an unexpected third party intermittent service degradation, users of Turnitin, Turnitin UK, & iThenticate may be experiencing sporadic network issues while trying to use the service.

We are pleased to advise that the service has been restored.

We encountered a degradation between the following times:
BST August 12th 18:10 – August 12th 19:06

Please accept our apologies if you were impacted by today’s degradation”

Panopto EU Cloud full outage

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Incident Update

Panopto Cloud Operations Status

Current Status: Operational

Affected Infrastructure
Components: Website, Video playback, Search, Recording / Uploading, Processing / Encoding, Integrations
Locations: Europe (EU)

On 2021-08-11 from 21:48 UTC to 22:07 UTC, the Panopto EU Cloud had a full site outage. All users were unable to access their sites, including being unable to view, edit or upload new recordings.

RCA: Starting at 21:48 UTC, the Panopto EU Cloud web servers received a surge of incoming requests. Each of these requests required handling by a subservice, and thus resulted in requests being sent from the web servers to that subservice. Due to both the large quantity of requests and the processing cost of handling these requests, the subservice quickly became backlogged leading to elevated latencies in handling requests. Complicating that, a configuration flaw in the web servers made it so these long-running requests were not terminated in a timely manner, and the web servers quickly became backlogged and unable to handle general site traffic. Our operations team mitigated the issue by manually scaling servers to exceed the demands of the temporary surge of requests.

To prevent a recurrence of this issue, our cloud operations team will update the web server configurations to ensure subservice requests have appropriate timeouts.

Panopto New Features and Important Summer Dates

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Panopto Logo

 

 

Panopto Downtime:

On Saturday, June 26th Panopto will be down for maintenance and for the installation of new features for the service. They believe the downtime will only run for about 4 hours, and will start at 10pm BST on the 26th.

During the downtime, you will not be able to access videos on your Panopto site and any attempts to upload from recording clients will result in a “Server unable to connect” message

Although it’s unfortunate that the service will be down, the features that will be arriving upon the upgrade are quite nice, and many have been things that staff have been requesting/hoping for for a while.

New Features:

• Multi-stream mobile and embed viewer — Exciting changes are coming to mobile devices and the Panopto embed viewer. Users will get a fully interactive multi-stream experience that allows them to dynamically control which streams are displayed and to cycle through visual layouts. Linked Youtube videos are also now supported in this viewer, along with the full suite of features available in Panopto’s interactive desktop viewer.

• Discussion Moderation — Content creators can moderate discussions for both live webcasts and on-demand videos, controlling which discussion comments are visible to the full audience of viewers.

• Multi-stream preview in Capture — After recording a video with Capture, users will now see all of their recorded streams in the preview viewer to increase confidence that all of their content has been captured correctly.

• Improved Sharing Experience — In response to usability feedback from users, we have revamped the sharing experience to be more intuitive and to use a modernized look and feel.

• Multi-Language Search — Users can specify the content language for each folder, enabling Panopto’s Smart Search and speech-to-text processing in multiple languages within the same site.

• Join or resume a session using Capture — Users can now use Capture to create distributed recordings, joining an in-progress recording or resuming a previous recording, right from the video library.

• Improved clips ordering — Users can now drag and drop clips to the desired location from the timeline UI in the editor.

• Mobile apps: Background/Reliable Upload & Share — Panopto’s mobile app now allows users to create recordings of unlimited duration and will upload videos while the app is in the background. Users can also easily share videos from within the app.

Some of these features will take a bit of time to wrap our heads around them, but Panopto believes that their service will be even easier and better to use.

Mandatory Client Upgrade

On Friday, July 16, we will require Panopto for Windows & Remote Recorders to be upgraded to version 9.0.2 or above and Panopto for Mac to version 10.1.0 or above.
The upgrade will be applied to your Panopto site at 12 midnight GMT/1:00 am BST.

To update your Panopto Recorder, go into a module with Panopto Video enabled. Click on Panopto Video to go to the Panopto Content area of the module (1) and then click on the Go to Panopto button in the upper right (2).

Screencapture of a module area with Panopto Video link and the expand button being highlighted

Once you’re in the Panopto Area, click on the “Download” button under your name in the top-right.

Screencapture of the download panopto video button under the users' name

Click the green Download button.

Screencapture of the green coloured download button

Double-click to launch the installer application

Screencapture of the downloaded exe file installer

Follow the onscreen-prompts to install the software.

Note: If you are prompted to enter a password to install this update, you MAY have to contact the Service Desk if the computer doesn’t allow you to run the installer.

Blank Video problem with MS Teams recordings

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We’ve received reports of “Blank Video” recordings in Teams, when sharing a Powerpoint in the session… When using a Windows 10 machine. (This issue does not seem to effect a Mac)

If you are running sessions in Teams, and wish to have successful recordings of the session, instead of sharing a Powerpoint, rather either “Share Window” or “Share Desktop” in the team-call when recording is needed, until this issue is resolved.

microsoft teams sharing image, showing to not use the powerpoint option

Issues accessing Microsoft 365 services 12th Jan 2021

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Users may have experienced access issues when using one or more Microsoft 365 services. Specifically SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams users in Europe; though, users may have also experienced similar issues with Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business.

Impact was primarily to users located in the United Kingdom; however, users in other regions who were routed through the affected United Kingdom-based infrastructure may have also been impacted.

Start time: Tuesday, January 12, 2021, 3:51 PM (3:51 PM UTC)

End time: Tuesday, January 12, 2021, 4:40 PM (4:40 PM UTC)

Preliminary root cause: Processing infrastructure that handles Microsoft 365 request traffic for European users began experiencing failures, preventing some users from accessing the services.

Panopto Service Disruption 22nd Dec, 2020

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On Dec 22nd 2020 between 22:05 and 22:25PM GMT, the Panopto EU Cloud experienced a site outage.

Panopto’s cloud operations team has resolved the issue.

The cause of the incident was a misconfiguration on a database server. During Panopto’s most recent downtime release on Dec 19, they updated the configuration of their database servers to better utilize physical memory. The new configuration contained an error that caused the database server to reach an out of memory condition. Panopto resolved the outage by fixing the misconfiguration on the server that ran out of memory. To prevent a recurrence of this issue, their engineering team audited and updated the memory configuration on all database servers.

Turnitin News – Turnitin service interruption on 15th February

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TurnItIn had advised that this issue was affecting all TurnItIn services worldwide, including access to the service, assignment submissions, the feedback studio, and similarity report processing.

From Turnitin:
We encountered a disruption between the following times: 14:52 – 07:06 GMT Feb 15-16, 2019. We’re pleased to announce that this has been resolved. Please accept our apologies if you were impacted by the disruption.

Turnitin News – Service Disruption due to Scheduled Maintenance

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Scheduled Maintenance

The following Turnitin services will be unavailable on January 5, 2019:
  • Turnitin and TurnitinUK (including all integrations and Turnitin Early Adopter Program)
  • Feedback Studio for iOS

To ensure that services remain stable, particularly during high submission periods, this maintenance will include several hardware updates and performance improvements.

When will services be unavailable?

GMT January 5 16:00 – 00:00 (January 6)

How will you be affected?

Turnitin’s machines require a health check every now and again… Users will be unable to submit, grade, or access our service during this maintenance window, so please ensure that any submission deadlines are adjusted to fall outside of the window.

Stay up to date with Turnitin system status by following @TurnitinStatus on Twitter.

Turnitin News – 7th of December

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Update:
We were advised on Friday evening (7/12/18) by Turnitin that the issues experienced during the afternoon were resolved at approximately 17:05 and that the service returned to normal. The timeframe for the Turnitin service degradation for both staff and students was 15:15 – 17:05.

Original post:
We have received reports that users are experiencing intermittent issues when attempting to access student submissions in Turnitin Feedback Studio. This issue will display as “503 error” when attempting to load a student submission in the browser.

Student work submission is also experiencing slowness and may also be affected.
[Update] 15:59 – Students are currently unable to submit.
[Update] 16:05 – Some submissions are going through. Intermittent service continues.
[Update] 17:55 – Turnitin reports that service has been restored as of 17:05.

We have reported this issue to Turnitin and will provide updates via this blog post which is also linked to on the Studies tab in studentcentral.