COLUMBIA – The MU Police Department is close to completing its investigation of the crash of Missourian servers.
The newspaper’s Web site was disabled for more than three days beginning Sept. 6. Police have been investigating to determine if a computer crime led to the server instability.
The case “is still ongoing,” said Capt. Scott Richardson of the MU Police Department. “It should be cleared up shortly.”
The consensus from Mizzou IT and the Missourian is that the cause was not due to malicious intent.
“It was human error, not a security event,” said Terry Robb, director of Mizzou IT.
The Missourian’s Web page and server functions have been completely restored.
The search function on the Missourian’s home page has been disabled for scheduled work and improvement not connected to the unexpected outage, said Michael Pearson, system administrator at the Missouri School of Journalism Network, or J-Net.
J-Net has “definitely taken precautions,” to avoid network failure in the future, Pearson said. He declined to give details of the server’s problems and remedies.
“It was a painful, painful thing not to be able to publish for that long,” said Tom Warhover, executive editor of the Missourian.
No advertising revenue loss was reported, said Dan Potter, general manager of the Missourian.
“We’re still not exactly sure what happened, but we’re glad to be back up and running,” he said.