At 4 a.m. on Jan. 15, Vanderbilt IT will be upgrading the University’s telephone system, causing outages of all university phones for around 20 minutes. This outage is relevant to Vanderbilt students because the blue light security system will also go down during this time.

The Vanderbilt University Police Department plans to increase its presence on campus during this time period due to this outage. In the event of an emergency, students can dial 911 on their cell phones or use the SafeVU app available for Androids and iPhones.

The reason for this update is primarily to assure that Vanderbilt  can maintain support from the telephone vendor, according to Leslie Schichtel Buchanan, a communications business analyst for Vanderbilt Information Technology.