Help Center Services

Critical Outage Procedure

Critical Outage Procedures Chart

A Critical Outage is when a mission critical service is down or severely degraded for the entire campus or a large portion of the campus.

Examples of mission critical services that would trigger a critical outage: Campus network, Internet access, Building network, Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) GroupWise, Student Email, GoSOLAR, Spectrum, PeopleSoft HR or File Server.

Critical Outage Communication Process

  1. IS&T support staff recognizes a critical outage situation.
  2. An IS&T staff member contacts the Technology Operations Center (TOC) or, during University hours, the Help Center. This initial contact is to inform the right people about the outage, open a help case and assign it to the TOC.
  3. The TOC confirms the outage, performs an initial diagnosis and contacts the appropriate support staff [Call Roster].
  4. Next, the TOC opens a help desk case and assigns it to the support staff member contacted [Call Roster].
  5. The TOC then contacts the Help Center with the case number, the nature of the outage and its impact.
  6. The Help Center posts an outage notice on the Help Center website and puts a front end message on the Help Center main line.
  7. The TOC sends an e-mail to outage@gsu.edu with the contents of the help
    desk case pasted into the body of the email.  The TOC also fields calls from IS&T staff experiencing related issues and from Georgia State customers.
  8. The TOC contacts the assigned support staff 20 minutes after assigning it in order to obtain an initial status report . The assigned support staff is contact every hour thereafter unless another interval of time is specified.*
  9. The TOC contacts the Help Center management staff with the initial assessment.
  10. Help Center management determines the appropriate level and method of communication to update the campus or impacted customers. 
  11. When the outage has been resolved and the system is back online, the assigned support staff notifies the TOC and the Help Center.
  12. The assigned support staff sends an e-mail to outage@gsu.edu with the problem resolution.
  13. The Help Center updates the web page and removes the front end message, notifying customers that the outage has been resolved.


Help Center – (404) 413-4357
TOC Console – (404) 413-4444


* A technician may be waiting for equipment from a vendor and may not have a status change until the equipment arrives.