On June 24th, Columbia University experienced an hourslong system-wide outage. Its internal email service went down. Students couldn’t log in to the platform where professors post assignments and course materials. Library catalogs went offline. Zoom was unavailable. Every single service that required Columbia’s official authentication service was affected, but maybe most eerily, images of President Donald Trump appeared on some screens across the campus. During that time, the personal data of at least every person who applied to Columbia between 2019 and 2024 was stolen.
It’s not yet clear the full scope of the breach, according to Columbi …