When current and rising sophomores logged onto Workday for the third round of course registration at 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning, many were unable to immediately register.

According to an email sent from Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Michael Cato to students and faculty Wednesday morning, this “slowdown” lasted about ten minutes due to increased user activity when registration opened. Cato wrote that Information Technology (IT) immediately notified Workday of the issue, who made performance adjustments to prevent a similar issue from occurring in the future.

Gus O’Neil-Dunne ’29 described how the website froze when registration opened, began showing server errors and then logged students out, sending some to the parent login rather than the student one. While some students had success registering on their phones, Workday Mobile crashed for others.

“Since the site came back on slowly instead of all at once, people had to watch others successfully register for courses while their own pages still weren’t loading. It was really soul crushing to see the look on someone’s face as they tried everything they could to load the page while people around them were already celebrating getting courses,” O’Neil-Dunne wrote in an email to the Orient.

This was the fourth semester that Workday Student, a cloud-based system that replaced Polaris, was used for class registration. Unlike Polaris, registration on Workday is on a first-come, first-served basis, opening in separate “rounds” for each class year. Students noted that many courses were already or nearly full when the third round opened.

“It took me ten minutes to register for my courses. I did not get two of the courses that I wanted, both of which are for my majors,” Mia Slote ’29 said. “I know a lot of my friends were able to register within like five minutes, and they were able to get more classes that they wanted.”

In his email, Cato asserted that the slowdown did not disadvantage students during course registration.

“We want to reassure you that students were not disadvantaged in the registration process. The issue was caused by Workday adjusting to a significant number of users accessing the system simultaneously, a process that took those ten minutes to complete,” Cato wrote. “Once the system became unavailable, it was unavailable to everyone equally, not just certain students or groups of students, and, once restored, it was available to all.”

Yesterday, Cato sent a follow-up email explaining that Workday processes registrations in the order in which they are received, regardless of how fast the screen renders for users. Additionally, he noted that yesterday’s course registration for first-year students did not experience these issues.

“IT is following up with Workday to affirm that today’s experience is our expectation and clarify how to avoid issues in the future,” Cato wrote.