Known Issues
When Brightspace experiences outages or ongoing issues, the problem and its resolution will be recorded to this page.
Experiencing an issue you don’t see here? Check out the Status Page for the tool you’re using below!
Ongoing Issues
Turnitin Error – Resolved!
When attempting to generate originality reports through Brightspace, some instructors were receiving an error stating:
“An originality report could not be generated.
‘Message from Turnitin™: You must supply an author user id when submitting as instructor”
This issue should now be resolved. If you see this error message in your course(s), please contact us at brightspace@vanderbilt.edu.
Grade Item Student View Display Settings – Fix coming soon!
When editing a grade item in Brightspace, instructors have options to show class average and/or grade distribution to students. When enabled, this information is displayed on the Grades page (if visible to students) and on the Class Progress page as charts. While these options work as intended on the Grades page, enabling either option will display both options to students via the Class Progress page. D2L (the company that makes Brightspace) is aware of the issue, and we are working with them on a fix. Currently a fix is planned to come out soon.
Unable to Add Questions to Surveys if Quizzes is Disabled in the Course
If the Quizzes tool is turned off in a course, users are unable to add questions to Surveys. This is a rare issue because Quizzes is available in courses by default, but D2L is aware of this issue and is working on a fix. The current workaround is to always leave the Quizzes tool enabled in a course.
Safari
Some users are experiencing issues when attempting to open files within Brightspace on Safari. D2L, the parent company of Brightspace, is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it. In the meantime, please use Chrome or Firefox to access Brightspace if an issue arises while using Safari.
Export/Import Grades Tool
Exporting and importing grades into Brightspace has proven to have some limitations. If you are experiencing problems with this tool or plan on using it, please contact us for help! brightspace@vanderbilt.edu. One urgent issue to be aware of is the order of your students upon export. They are not always accurately alphabetized by last name. Please review the order of students before entering grades and importing back into Brightspace. Please view our guide on how to export and import grades here.
Formula Grade Items
There are glitches with the Formula option in grade items. Symbols are appearing/not appearing where they should when the formula is saved, causing incorrect calculations. It is suggested to use the Calculated tool instead. Please contact Brightspace Support for more help with setting up your gradebook.
PASt Events
November 10, 2023
Several instructors and students notified our team that files such as the syllabus or other PDF documents uploaded into the Content area are not displaying properly in the browser. A temporary workaround was to download the documents to your own device. We worked with D2L, the parent company of Brightspace, to put a fix in place, and we will continue to work with them to identify what caused this issue.
October 2023
Previously, when creating or editing an Assignment, attempts to add an Assignment to a category were not saved. This issue has now been resolved.
September 2023
In September, it was discovered that when creating a new rubric, or editing an existing rubric, users were unable to reorder rubric criterion (horizontal rows). As of early October, this issue has been resolved.
August 12, 2023
Turnitin underwent scheduled maintenance on Saturday, August 12 from 9am-5pm. During this time, Turnitin was unavailable. This also included other products from Turnitin including Gradescope.
June 12-14, 2023
On 6/12/2023, it was discovered that instructors were not able to add notes to assignment submissions via the annotation screen. We worked with Brightspace to diagnose this issue, and they were able to resolve it by 6/14/23.
May 2nd, 2023
On 5/2/2023, it was discovered that a large volume of NURS courses had been removed from Brightspace. We worked with Brightspace to restore these courses, and we were able to do so within the following 24 hours.
January 23, 2023
Kaltura experienced a major outage that resulted in users not being able to view, edit, or upload videos. This issue has been resolved as of the afternoon of 1/23.
December 7th, 2021
Several users experienced issues with Brightspace loading. Users could only access courses by going to the waffle grid at the top of the landing page. This issue has been resolved as of the afternoon of 12/7.
November 6th, 2021
Several users experienced issues trying to log into Brightspace during the morning of November 6th. Most reported seeing a 504 gateway error upon attempting to log in. This issue has been resolved as of the afternoon of 11/6.
October 28th, 2021
Some users who attempted to access Kaltura media within Brightspace were receiving an “Internal Server Error” message. This issue has been reported resolved by the vendor as of 11/4.
September 8th, 2021
When users attempted to add an annotation to submitted assignments, sometimes only the first letter could be typed. In other instances, no text input was being accepted. D2L resolved this issue midday on 9/9.
August 15th, 2021
VUIT scheduled a planned outage on August 15th from 6 AM – 11 AM. During this time, users were unable to log into Brightspace, YES, and their email accounts.
August 5th, 2021
Beginning on 8/3/2021, enrollments modified in YES were not being passed correctly into Brightspace. This issue was resolved on 8/5/2021 around 3 PM.
November 30th, 2020
Beginning around 10:30 PM CST, Brightspace’s homepage stopped loading upon sign-in. Company reps are actively working to resolve the issue. The issue seemed to be resolved on 12/01/2020 around 7:45 AM CST.
September 15th, 2020
Vanderbilt’s single sign-on (SSO) experienced an outage between 8:30 and 10:30pm. We heard from VUIT representatives that a major incident caused temporary application outages. VU Applications impacted include GET (students ordering meals), Brightspace, Slate, Box, Zoom, and others. VUMC technicians are onsite working the issue. Any issues with signing into applications should now be resolved. If you are still having issues, please contact VUIT Support at 615-343-9999 or log a help request at help.it.vanderbilt.edu
August 24th, 2020
Zoom experienced widespread outages with their web portal, which Brightspace relies upon. Students and faculty were temporarily unable to join meetings directly through Zoom’s Brightspace integration until the issue was resolved. However, the Zoom desktop client did still work.
November 16th, 2019
Students are unable to view in-line feedback on Assignments. This problem began sometime over the weekend. Students attempt to view the in-line feedback provided by their instructors, but encounter a blank page or error message. This issue was resolved.
August 13, 2019
Beginning around 2:00pm, some users experienced intermittent slowness or outage in Brightspace. Issue was resolved by D2L.
June 17, 2019
Beginning in the 1:00 pm hour, slowness in Brightspace was noticed. This was fixed at around 2:00 pm.
February 6, 2019
From roughly 2:00 pm to 2:45 pm there was a technical issue preventing new content from being added to My Media (Kaltura). This issue is now fixed.
January 31, 2019
Brightspace was inaccessible from roughly 9:30 am to 10:30 am due to an issue with Vanderbilt’s single sign on system. This has now been fixed.
January 5, 2019
Turnitin functionality will be unavailable on January 5th, 2019 from 10 am to 6 pm for scheduled maintenance.
December 7, 2018
Turnitin’s Feedback Studio experienced issues from roughly 9:15 am to 11:05 am. The program is now back up and operational.
November 30, 2018
Email delivery through the Vanderbilt email systems was temporarily interrupted on Friday afternoon. Mailflow was restored at 5:30pm and all queued email was cleared by 5:55pm. No messages were lost, but you may receive some messages out of order as a result of the queuing.
November 8, 2018
Turnitin experienced an issue with their service from 8:08 am to 8:38 am Central time. Their service has now been restored.
October 29-30, 2018
The e-mail functionality inside of Brightspace experienced significant delays causing sent e-mails to show up in the proper inboxes hours later. There was also an issue with these same delays impacting the e-mails sent from various course notifications. This issue has now been fixed.
September 22, 2018
Instructors, please be aware that Turnitin will be performing some proactive emergency maintenance that will temporarily disrupt services on September 22, 2018 from 10 AM to 6:30 PM CDT. During this time, users will be unable to submit or grade anything using this tool. Turnitin recommends adjusting any submission deadlines so that they do not fall within this window of time.
September 20, 2018
Turnitin service went down and was unavailable from 11:15 to 11:39 am. TII has implemented a fix and the service is now functioning properly.
September 16, 2018 (7:30 PM) – September 17, 2018 (7:13 AM)
Turnitin service may be intermittent.
September 5, 2018
Brightspace was down from 7:09 am to 7:45 am. Brightspace is now back up and operational.
September 4, 2018
Opening Brightspace periodically would cause an error to appear in the user’s browser. The issue occurred from 1:08 PM to 1:15 pm and should now be resolved.
August 29, 2018 – August 30, 2018
Users who have the role of TA (Grader) are currently not able to view Content in course modules. The issue has been escalated to D2L and a fix is being worked on.
August 28 – 29, 2018
Users of the Turnitin services may encounter intermittent issues getting reports and accessing existing submissions. Turnitin is investigating this issue as a priority. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
July 20 – Present, 2018
Assignments copied over to a new version of a course (Ex: Moving assignment content from 2017F to 2018F) may cause Brightspace to throw up an error when Turnitin is enabled for those assignment submission folders. D2L is aware of the issue and is currently working on a fix.
July 10, 2018
10:00am – 6:00pm
TurnItIn will be down for scheduled maintenance. Users will be unable to submit and grade during this maintenance window, so please ensure that any submission deadlines are adjusted to fall outside of the window.
January 29 – February 3, 2018
Some Turnitin users (including those integrated with our service) may have experienced an error when attempting to leave comments through Feedback Studio from Jan 29 1:30 am PST- Feb 03 7:09 PST. Post resolution, root cause analysis was performed and monitoring / alerting has been put in place to further mitigate the chances of similar technical difficulties from occurring.
January 26, 2018
9:30am – 10:00am
Users may have experienced issues being able to send email within Brightspace.
November 1, 2017
Turnitin.com experienced a service issue from roughly 7:30am to 3:30pm central.
October 29, 2017
WileyPLUS will be unavailable from 5:00 – 6:30 AM Central.
October 17, 2017
7:30am Central Time: Users receive the “internal error” message when navigating Brightspace. D2L currently investigating.
10:45am – D2L continues to investigate the problem. Users may experience trouble logging in, accessing content, submitting files, and entering grades.
12:30pm – D2L continues to investigate.
1:00pm – D2L reports that all issues are resolved.
October 2, 2017
Brightspace is currently experiencing significant slowness with the document conversion tool. Users will experience slowness when trying to view the preview window for Word documents or Excel files inside courses. The current work-around is to download these files and view them from the computer. D2L is actively working on a solution.
September 16, 2017
WileyPLUS Planned Maintenance
WileyPLUS will be unavailable from 5.a.m. to 7.a.m. ET on Saturday, September 16th.
September 14, 2017:
3:07pm – 3:29pm
From D2L
Incident: The D2L Network Operations Center (NOC) advises that an infrastructure event may be impacting your PRODUCTION site performance.
End User Impact: Users may be experiencing intermittent issues when attempting to utilize the following services:
• Activity Feed
• Capture
• Content Service
• Course Image Catalog service
• Degree Compass
• Document Conversion Service (DoCS)
• Manager Dashboard
• Video Note
September 9, 10 2017 – WileyPLUS Planned Maintenance
From WileyPLUS:
Wiley continues to fine tune WileyPLUS as the new term kicks into high gear. We will be doing some performance enhancements for our integrations with campus Learning Management Systems. WileyPLUS, will be unavailable on Saturday September 9th from 5:00 – 6:00 AM EST, and on Sunday September 10th from 5:00 – 6:00AM EST. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any questions, please contact your WileyPLUS Implementation Specialist or send a message to implementationspecialist@wiley.com.
September 7, 2017 – Turnitin Service Alert:
Turnitin Global experienced a service degradation between 6:00 AM – 10:00 AM CT
August 28, 2017
From approximately 7:37am to 8:35am Central, Brightspace experienced a problem with an API which resulted in the course list widget on the homepage to be unresponsive. Other areas within a Brightspace course could have been affected by this API malfunction as well.
August 5, 2017 – Planned Turnitin Maintenance
7am – 1pm PST / 3pm – 9pm BST / 12am – 6am (Sunday 6) AEST (click here for your local time zone).
Turnitin will be undergoing essential maintenance and will be unavailable.
All Turnitin customers on the following services will be affected including:
Turnitin (including mobile)
TurnitinUK
Integrations
iThenticate
WriteCheck
The following services will not be affected:
Revision Assistant
Where applicable, please be aware no submissions or grading will be possible through any of the services listed above during this time. We therefore advise that submission deadlines be set outside of this maintenance window.
Please follow @TurnitinStatus for the latest updates.
April 28, 2017: The Brightspace classlist email function is flagging emails sent from a course as SPAM for the recipients. VUIT and D2L are working to resolve the issue. Instructors can use their Outlook or webmail clients to send emails to students as a temporary work-around. UPDATE: May 5, 2017: The email tool in Brightspace is working as expected.