Finn Keyes | Current Affairs Editor
The deadline for online application for student grants has been extended until Midnight on Monday August 5th. The extension follows a deluge of applications preceding the initial deadline of Midnight August 1st overwhelming the system and causing a crash. Thousands of students were unable to lodge their grant application leading to more criticism of the Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) computer system.
The IT crash came just hours after Education Minister Ruairí Quinn vowed that SUSI would perform better for the coming academic term. SUSI is especially keen to be seen as doing right by students following the intense controversy surrounding it during the last academic year when almost 20,000 students did not receive their grant until the new year and a further 2,200 were still waiting as term ended.
Speaking at Student Union Training in Waterford IT on July 16th, John Conroy, Head of Communications for SUSI, told the incoming officers that all the problems with the system had been dealt with for this coming academic year. He ensured students that there would be no more systematic problems and that the applications should be processed in full by January 2014.
Alan Murphy, head of operations with SUSI, said the system was out of action for less than two hours. “It was a very brief outage due to congestion and was quickly fixed,” he added. SUSI stated this morning that the website is now operating normally and that no student data was lost or compromised during the crash, which caused the website to be out of operation for over two hours between 7pm and 9pm. SUSI initially extended the deadline to Midday today but further extended it this morning to ensure that no students were left behind.
SUSI now encourages students to send their applications in as quickly as possible and says it aims to have all grants paid by the end of October 2013.
