The newly minted MyNIU portal is experiencing significant technical difficulties, the symptoms of which first appeared around 11 a.m. Thursday.

The ITS web page listed updating warnings of login errors due to high utilization of the system Thursday afternoon. ITS has been working to resolve this problem, and has taken down the MyNIU portal, said Jim Fatz, director of information security and operations at ITS. Students wanting to register for classes and access other MyNIU services will be able to without problems by following a direct link to the MyNIU servers posted to the MyNIU main page or by going to sa.niu.edu.

Fatz said the high usage of the portal from course registration is a “casual factor” for the outage, but not the underlying problem with the portal.

“We should normally be able handle the load of students that are registering for classes,” Fatz said. “We saw symptoms like this last semester, but the overall cause of this problem is more elusive than before. The portal was taken down at about 1 p.m. [Thursday}, and we have a team of technicians working towards solving this issue.”

The MyNIU portal is set to stay offline until the problem is resolved and preventative measures are added for future usage. In the meantime, students can still register for courses and should have no problems using the MyNIU features and servers.

Fatz said ITS will take time in looking at the Portal issues, and will not reinstate its use until all problems are fixed.