Eastern Michigan University web services began to resume service around 3 p.m. on June 16, 2026 after a damaged fiber optic cable near campus took access down for over an hour.
Brian Arnold, a support center analyst for Merit Network Inc., said that the damage was likely the result of a burning electrical line. Merit describes itself as "an independent nonprofit corporation governed by Michigan’s public universities."
The EMU IT department stated on its status update page at 3:14 p.m. that service had been restored.
Krish Narayanan, the department head for computer science at EMU said that the outage forced the Bits and Bytes middle school programming camp to abruptly change plans for the day. The campers were using a website to program small robots in Pray-Harrold when connection to the internet was lost. Narayanan said that the camp was able to continue by switching to an offline activity.
Editor's note: Laura Meriweather worked at the Bits and Bytes camp in 2025.
