During the most important week of the year, students experienced difficulties when trying to access the MyBSU banner to check their schedules, class information and financial aid.
The site was launched by the Information Technology Services consultants, who said they created the platform so students could easily navigate the website.
Vice President of Information Technology Phil Repp said the site was experiencing an overload of requests.
"We made some changes on those drivers at 1:30 in the morning [August 22]," Repp said.
Repp said technical difficulties were reported by graduate students, but was unaware the issue was campus-wide.
Some students said the site was not working over the summer months when they needed access to financial aid or schedules.
Sophomore psychology major Melanie Upchurch said she experienced several difficulties during the summer when trying to apply for a campus job.
"The whole website itself was down, and I didn't find that out until I drove three hours from my home to Muncie for a campus job interview and needed to print out my schedule," Upchurch said.
Repp said they weren't aware that the site had been down for so many students at the beginning of the week.
"It's the start of school, which is the common denominator," Repp said. "Tens of thousands of students coming back and logging on - we hadn't had that volume of traffic yet [on the site]."
The site was sending an error message to students when they logged on to view their records.
"We hope that the fix we had will secure our issues, but I'm not going to promise you that glitches won't come back up," Repp said.
Sophomore Telecommunications major Josh Dean said the site is not compatible with Google Chrome, which is the web browser he uses.
"I think it is a bad reflection on both the tech department and Ball State in general that we can't even keep our computer systems working during arguably one of the most important times of the year," Dean said.
The site has recently included new modules including academic records, payment services, and a link to Blackboard is also available on the site.
Senior IT Architect Todd Meister said although Blackboard and the BSU email seem to be integrated on the site, it has not fully made its debut on the banner.
"There is some level of integration, but we are keeping them separate," Meister said. "Eventually we can provide tighter integration."
Repp said although there are some flaws in the system, it has been a huge success in the registration aspect when it launched last spring.
"It was live registration, [which means] it admits you into the class, and you know what your schedule is when you did it," Repp said. "Students were very proud of that because they didn't have to wait for their schedule."
The live registration system was groundbreaking for both students and faculty because of the live time factor.
Sophomore elementary and math education major Hayley Andrews said she didn't experience any issues with the site and actually prefers the new system to its rival site My Education Gateway.
Repp said he and his consultants, Meister and Loren Malm, have developed a monitoring system that is launched every second of the day in case instances like last Monday happen. His team will be able to fix the issue before it surfaces.
As improvements continue to be made to the site, the larger issues are taken care of by Repp's team of consultants, who are constantly making changes for advancement.
"We have consultants, and when we see something that does not make sense, we move into action to find the source of that error," Repp said.
Repp said students should not be experiencing any further error messages.
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