Montclair State University students were prepared to register for the upcoming academic term until the institution’s Banner student system started experiencing multiple issues and disrupted the process.
Some were reporting “website Error 404” messages during the time of registration. Others complain about white screens, registration errors with classes and the system crashing right before hitting submit.
For some, even Nest and Navigate have crashed, causing students to lose access to meetings with their advisors.
Abby Judah, a freshman history major, shared the struggles she encountered with the website crashing while registering.
“The sight crashed for a good hour,” Judah said. “I ended up getting all the classes, [but] it was very stressful. I had both computers set up and my phone, so I had everything ready to go. Once I got in, after every class I had to re-login, because it kept on crashing.”
Abby Judah, a freshman history major, says registering for the upcoming semester was a stressful process.
Aliza Rhein | The Montclarion
Gerson Cordova, who as a freshman psychology major is new to all this stress, said registering was a difficult process.
“I tried [registering] at 12, but then it went down, [for] 20-30 minutes,” Cordova said. “It was very much stressful. I just kept refreshing, then at some point I was just like, I’ll let it load.”
Gerson Cordova, a freshman psychology major, says that registration was chaos due to the site crashing continuously.
Aliza Rhein | The Montclarion
Claudia Martillo, a junior journalism and digital media major, also shared similar issues with the website.
“It took an hour and a half for it to come back up [after crashing] and afterward they had issues,” Martillo said. “All these restrictions came up, that I had not seen before.”
Some students like Dante Pearson, a freshman information technology major, have theories as to why this issue is occurring.
“Thousands of people go on one page to register,” Pearson said. “Many people all on the same [Wi-Fi] network [are] trying to register. The system simply can’t support that many people.”
And Pearson isn’t far off. According to Information Technology (IT) student service desk technician Jason Paragallo one thing affecting the system is the amount of people accessing it.
“It’s because of the high amount of traffic the [site] is seeing,” Paragallo said. Andrew Mees, the university’s spokesperson, said the administration is working on resolving the issue.
“At this time, we do not know the exact cause of the issues,” Mees said. “Information Technology is monitoring this situation in real time and will initiate system restarts when potential issues begin to arise. The system should be unavailable for 10-15 minutes, at which point it will be back up and functioning normally again.”
Martillo also said that Montclair State should take care of these Banner issues before registration comes around.
“There’s so many problems and glitches in the system that need to be fixed before, not during,” Martillo said. “It runs the risk of people not getting their classes that they need in time. I think working with IT and people who can help structure the website more properly [will help]. And make sure that it runs smoothly without this many glitches.”
Claudia Martillo, a junior journalism and digital media major, says it took a while for her to be able to register.
Photo courtesy of Claudia Martillo
IT is still working to fix this issue, but in the meantime they have some suggestions that could help the Montclair State community to handle the situation.
“If some students are still experiencing any issues registering, I suggest switching browsers,” Paragallo said. “For example, if they are using Safari have them switch to Chrome and the only other thing I can suggest until Banner is up and working is refreshing the page every once in a while.
