Dear Symbiota community,

As you may be aware, the upcoming Symbiota Support Group meeting was originally intended to cover recent improvements to Symbiota Docs.

Given the recent portal outages, we have decided to repurpose this meeting to provide time for the Symbiota users to connect with the Symbiota Support Hub on this matter. Monday's meeting will thus include substantial time for Q&A. Time permitting, content regarding Symbiota Docs may also be delivered.

Please register to join us this Monday, August 4th at 12p Pacific / 3p Eastern: Register Here.

Estimada comunidad de Symbiota,

Los invitamos a la sesión en español de Preguntas y Respuestas acerca de la reciente disrupción de actividad en los portales. Por favor registrarse en este enlace para acceder a la sesión que se relizará el lunes 4 de agosto a las 3:00pm Kansas/2:00pm Centroamérica/8:00pm UTC luego del Symbiota Support Group, donde también se abordarán estos temas.

~ The Symbiota Support Hub

7/30/2025

Dear Symbiota community,

We want to thank you for your continued patience and understanding as we navigate the ongoing outage affecting Symbiota portals.

Our team is in constant communication with the technical team at ASU, who is working to contain and diagnose the issue, as well as to take steps to prevent its reoccurrence. We are actively exploring all options to restore the portals.

We will continue to keep you updated as we make progress. You can now find a record of our communications at Symbiota.org (see the Updates page). Please feel free to share widely with any users who may be affected.

In the meantime, we deeply appreciate your patience, and we’re grateful to be part of a community that values data security, collaboration, and transparency.

Thank you for bearing with us.

~The Symbiota Support Hub

7/25/2025

Dear Symbiota community,

As you are aware, most Symbiota Support Hub-hosted portals continue to be down. We understand how frustrating and inconvenient this is, and we deeply regret the disruption this may be causing you and your collections.

The downtime is due to ongoing security-related issues that we are actively investigating in close coordination with ASU Security Operations. We are committed to resolving this situation as quickly and securely as possible. Unfortunately, due to the severity of the issue and the time cost of re-constructing the portals, we foresee that getting the portals back online is going to take some time, potentially more than a week.

We should be able to provide another update by mid- next week. We are "all hands on deck" to resolve this, as is the ASU IT team. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.

~The Symbiota Support Hub

7/24/2025

Dear Symbiota community,

We regret to inform you that the security issues affecting the 5 reinstated portals (CCH2, CNH, Lichen Portal, Bryophyte Portal, NEON) are not yet fully resolved, and we have shut down the hosting server once again.

We will be in touch as soon as we have more information. Again, we sincerely apologize for the stress and delays in productivity that we know this is causing. Thanks again for your patience.

~The Symbiota Support Hub

7/21/2025

Dear Symbiota community,

We want to inform you that Symbiota portals, Symbiota.org, and the Symbiota Help Desk are currently experiencing a temporary outage as we address a recently identified security issue.

As part of our ongoing commitment to keeping your data safe and secure, we have taken most portals offline for their protection and to apply necessary updates. Several portals, including CCH2, the Lichen Portal, Bryophyte Portal, Consortium of Northeast Herbaria, PteridoPortal, and Algae Portal are accessible in a read-only state.

At this time, there is no indication that data loss or corruption has occurred, with the exception of any edits made this morning (7/21/2025). We are currently making extra backups of the data to ensure this continues to be the case.

Our technical team is working diligently to resolve the issue and restore access as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We will continue to be in touch with more information as it becomes available.

If you have any urgent questions or need assistance, you can temporarily reach us at hub@symbiota.org. Emails sent to help@symbiota.org will not be received until our Help Desk is restored.

Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding during this time.

~Katie, Lindsay, and the rest of the Symbiota Support Hub