Hub Knoxville, off-ccampus housing on the strip. Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.
Ericksen Gomez-Villeda / The Daily Beacon
After the Arkansas football game, many students on the Strip reported the loss of WiFi in their apartments. Service was wiped out, making internet usage unreliable.
Many students living in the apartments affected could not watch television, use applications on their phones and, their biggest concern: the effects it had on completing schoolwork.
Lincoln O’Brien is a sophomore majoring in kinesiology; he lives in the Standard, one of the apartment complexes on the Strip.
“Since all of my schoolwork is online, it didn’t allow me to do anything, and my hotspot wasn’t strong enough to upload and download documents I needed to work with,” O’Brien said. “I had a chem exam (the other night) and it impeded my ability to study within my own room.”
Nowadays, most assignments and exams that professors assign their students are fully online instead of being done on paper. So, in the case of a WiFi outage such as this one, students are struggling to complete their assignments in their own homes.
Jon Campbell Holloway, a sophomore kinesiology major, also lives in the Standard.
“The majority of the homework and classwork that we have to do involves using Canvas or online materials, so not being able to access those in our apartment was extremely frustrating,” Holloway said.
Another apartment complex on the Strip that experienced the outage is the Hub. Just finishing construction this past summer, students moving in were very excited for the brand new appliances, yet there have been issues so far.
Sophomore Mari Cate Macdonald is a political science major who lives in the Hub.
“It seems the WiFi at the Hub is very unreliable, this isn’t the first time it’s gone out before,” Macdonald said. “Also, it’s a data dead-spot, so when there’s no WiFi we can’t even use our devices in some of the rooms.”
The Standard, off-campus apartments on S. 17th Street. Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.
Ericksen Gomez-Villeda / The Daily Beacon
Because of the issues with the WiFi, many students have been taken out of their daily routines and schedules that they have built over the first half of this semester.
Karla Pena is a senior human development and family science major who also lives in the Hub and has grown accustomed to her routine over the years.
“It’s completely thrown off my schedule and has been really stressful and exhausting,” Pena said. “I’ve had to change where and when I study, leave the apartment to find reliable internet, and do assignments at the last minute using my phone’s hotspot.”
Many students either have jobs, rigorous class schedules or organizations that they are a part of that makes it difficult to find chunks of time to get their work done. Sometimes going to the library or another study spot is not the choice students want to have to make after a long day.
“I have had to go to public spaces to do my work, and for online classes, it’s been more difficult,” Macdonald said. “It’s doable but definitely annoying, because I like to do my schoolwork at my own desk.”
Both the Hub and the Standard have been sending emails out to their residents with various updates about the outage. They linked the issues to a large AT&T network failure, but had no further information on the matter.
In one of their later emails sent out to residents, the Hub stated that “AT&T is still unable to provide us with an ETA for when they will resolve the service outage” and that they “apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
“They gave very little explanation and haven’t updated us regularly,” Pena said. “I feel like they haven’t taken residents’ concerns seriously, especially since it’s affecting our education and daily responsibilities.”
Similarly, according to residents at the Standard, they received barely any information on the matter.
“I got two emails total; one saying the WiFi was out and the other saying it was back,” O’Brien said.
After roughly two to three days without service in their homes, students who faced the outage now have WiFi again. Whether these issues are fully resolved or will continue to pop up is unknown, but in a digital environment like this, the effects of an outage are plentiful.
“I feel like for all the money that we pay every month to live here, this should’ve been a bigger priority and it should’ve been resolved quicker than it did,” Holloway said.