As University of Wisconsin junior Emily Yslas tried to log in to her MyUW account for enrollment on Thursday, she found herself unable to sign up from next semester’s classes because Student Center was down.

Yslas and numerous UW juniors and seniors enrolling in classes this week experienced frustration as they attempted to enroll in classes only to find the system down or the Student Center slow to load.

“It was really frustrating and concerning,” Yslas said.

Students using the class search functionality in the student center were experiencing load and performance issues, Scott Owczarek, UW Registrar, said. These issues stemmed from new software from their vendor that UW was required to implement, but was not designed for the needs and demand of UW’s large campus, he said.

UW became aware of the issues around 7 p.m. Tuesday evening after receiving feedback from on social media from UW students, Owczarek said. As more students were trying to enroll and sessions were timing out, the problem “compounded exponentially”, he said.

“Even though the program was installed with a bundle in the summer, we don’t get the volume that reveals the problem until enrollment time with the high demand on class search so it can be a tricky thing to diagnose until you get volume that we’ve seen this week,” Steve Hahn, Interim Vice Provost for Enrollment Management, said.

The DoIT team and UW Registrar immediately began working on solutions and alternate fixes to the problem, Owczarek said. Changes were implemented in the afternoon on Wednesday that seemed to resolve the problems, he said.

The changes made looked promising, but the servers had to go down shortly on Thursday morning to implement the fix across the entire application suite, Hahn said.

Yslas’s enrollment time happened to be at the same time the servers were scheduled to go down Thursday, and this was the first time she experienced issues with the website during enrollment.

“I was in a panic because I thought it was just something wrong with mine,” Yslas said.

Yslas decided to use twitter to reach out to UW and the Office of the Registrar because she was unsure of what to do.

Yslas said it would have been better if UW had changed the enrollment or maintenance time, as she was not able to register until 11 a.m. instead of her original 10:30 a.m. time.

Hahn said the university has opened a case file with the vendor they get the software from and the case will be discussed with key senior leaders to ensure an issue like this does not happen again.

“I was very happy the DoIT team and the registrar,” Hahn said. “Literally, overnight they diagnosed the problem and took steps to mitigate the situation by the next afternoon.”

As of Thursday afternoon, all enrollment requests were being handled below capacity and with instantaneous response, Hahn said.