News
Hardware malfunction halts CAREERlink access for 3 days
Students logging into CAREERlink to apply for jobs last Thursday through Monday were met with an unpleasant surprise—the site was down.
CAREERlink, Washington University’s interactive career database, enables employers to post openings and students to apply to those openings. The site is run by Symplicity Corporation, a group that runs the career websites of universities all over the nation.
Symplicity’s hardware malfunctioned nationwide on Friday, with trouble starting on Thursday. The site was backed up on Monday, but students and employers across the country were affected, Vice Chancellor for Students Mark Smith said, estimating that 40 to 50 percent of colleges use Symplicity.
The Career Center has been working with employers to extend their deadlines, and most employers have obliged. An email was sent to students on Friday to update them about the crash.
“We worked with all the employers to extend the deadlines and made sure employers knew,” Smith said. “If any student has a problem or thinks something happened they should let us know so we can try and help them.”
Employees at Symplicity did not respond to emails or tweets sent by Student Life on Wednesday.
In spite of the update, many students applying for jobs panicked when they saw the site was down.
“It was very frustrating. I had looked and made a list of companies and deadlines and there were a few applications I wanted to get done over the weekend, so it was really stressful that it was down, especially since at the time I didn’t know they’d try to get extensions,” senior Robbie Richler said.
Senior Parker Brogdon was planning to apply to Target Corporation on Thursday, but when he tried to send his application Thursday night the site was down. He had a contact to email his application to, but still worried.
“I appreciated how they tried to get the deadlines pushed back,” Brogdon said.
Washington University Career Center has been using Symplicity for four years and has never experienced this sort of outage before.
Other schools that use the service include Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania.