Turnitin provide feedback on availability problems on 10/11 December 2013

During January and February, 2014 there have been two high level UK discussions with iParadigms (the company behind Turnitin). The service is now routinely used by around 95% of UK HEIs.

The disruption caused during 10/11 December 2013 meant that both the Head of eLearning Forum (HeLF) and the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) requested meetings with iParadigms senior management to explain the problems and to obtain details on how these would not occur in the future.

Turnitin stated the primary cause of the December outage was a failure to provision a database server of the required capacity even through this had been designed at the correct size.  This meant the under-provisioned server was overwhelmed at peak load.

UCISA have now confirmed that they are satisfied that the capacity planning, monitoring and failover arrangements Turnitin now have in place should reduce the risk of technical failure.  This includes double, and where needed triple, checking of key operational tasks and decisions.

Northampton will continue to monitor the servivce which Turnitin provides and make an independent risk assessment / develop contingency plans as appropriate.

Please contact Rob Howe if you wish to review any of the correspondence passed to UCISA or HeLF.