An online music-downloading program sent Facebook messages to University of Wisconsin students last Tuesday, which the university says makes false claims about their affiliation.

The message from Ruckus.com falsely advertised a partnership with UW that establishes free accounts for all UW students that they can activate at any time.

Brian Rust, senior administrative program specialist at the UW Department of Information Technology said 1,100 students — about 15 percent of the University Housing population — subscribed to Ruckus.com within 24 hours of the message being sent.

While all of the Madison subscribers may not live in University Housing, Rust said, the effect is much more acute in the dorms because there is a limited network capacity that is shared by so many students.

Rust said 50 percent of the network capacity in university housing — also known as bandwidth — was used up by Wednesday.

The bandwidth is usually adequate, Rust noted, but said when students are downloading music, "it really chokes the network."

"It's like an interstate highway where you have only six lanes," Rust said. "So when there's heavy traffic, everything slows down. The same thing happens on the network — when you have people downloading music with only so much bandwidth allocated … it severely limits other things they are able to do."

Rust said DoIT advises students to be suspect of any online messages they receive directly from a company about a UW affiliation that does not have university endorsement.

Members of Ruckus.com did not respond to e-mail requests as of press time.