Adams 12 CTO: Dec. 11 outage disrupted core systems for 2 hours 40 minutes; incident report completed
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Summary
Chief technology officer Greg reported a Dec. 11 outage that left Infinite Campus, PeopleSoft, phone and identity systems unavailable for "2 hours and 40 minutes"; IT produced a six-page incident report and listed device and attack volumes for the district.
Greg, the districts chief technology officer, told the Finance & Audit Committee the district measures uptime for core systems during school hours with a 99% availability target but experienced a disruptive outage on Thursday, Dec. 11 that rendered several core services unavailable for roughly "2 hours and 40 minutes." He said the affected systems included the student-information system (Infinite Campus), PeopleSoft, the phone system and identity-and-access services.
"We did have a lot of those core services that were unavailable for 2 hours and 40 minutes last Thursday, December 11," Greg said, and added IT produced a "very detailed 6 page incident report" documenting the timing, root cause analysis, communications and lessons learned.
Greg said the district manages roughly "65 and a half thousand" devices (Chromebooks, staff laptops and other endpoints) and handles approximately 302,000 inbound and outbound emails per day. He described layered defenses: the district blocks a large volume of automated network attacks daily (reported as just under 30 million blocked attacks on a typical day and spikes to 40—50 million on holidays) and filters about 20% of incoming email as malicious or unwanted.
Greg said incident documentation and a leadership debrief produced immediate recommendations and that IT leadership carried out a deep dive to identify improvements. He framed outages as operationally disruptive to learning and administrative functions and said the district will focus on lessons learned as it improves monitoring, communications and recovery playbooks.
Greg credited the cybersecurity manager Dan Dockendorf and his team for defensive work but emphasized the need for continuous improvement and stronger automation through the forthcoming ERP and other investments.
The report to the committee combined uptime metrics, incident narrative and suggested next steps; IT leaders asked the committee to consider the monitoring report and noted this is a high-priority operational area for the district.