Ithaca College’s Information Technology Services has been receiving complaints from members of the college community regarding Windows computers on campus experiencing unexpected shutdowns and being stuck in a state of perpetual reboot.

Ed Fuller, associate vice president of ITS, said the problem is an issue with McAfee, and not specific to the college’s network.

“It appears that it may be an issue with the McAfee virus scanning products that we use, ironically enough, for protecting ourselves from viruses,” Fuller said.

According to CNET news, a McAfee update of its virus software confused PCs’ immune systems yesterday, causing the software to attack legitimate operating system processes. CNET reported that at the University of Michigan’s medical school 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed yesterday because of the update.

ITS released a System Alert at 10:46 a.m. about the issue:

“As of 10:30 AM on Wednesday, our Windows computers are stuck in a state of perpetual reboot. We are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Mac computers are unaffected.”

Dave Maley, associate director of media relations, said most PCS on campus are not accessible.

“ITS is working on fixing this problem,” he said.

Juan Arroyo, assistant professor of politics, said he experienced these problems on his office computer and immediately went to the ITS Helpdesk to see if the issue could be resolved.
“I came back [to my office] after classes and started to work on a presentation for my next class and my computer just kept turning itself off,” he said. “I asked the [politics] deptartment administrator and she was having the same problem.”

The ITS staff declined to comment at the time, but expect to release more information about their solution soon.

Check back later for more updates.