From our other sites
The story
On October 2, 2026, Osaka Metropolitan University suffered a major outage in its information infrastructure systems, including internal email and the campus portal, forcing all classes to be cancelled for the day. According to Kyodo News, there’s no timeline yet for restoration. The thread kicked off with comments like “never heard of this university,” followed by explanations of how it was formed in 2022 from the merger of Osaka Prefecture University and Osaka City University. The discussion also heated up around how attendance-taking now depends entirely on the system, as well as debates over the school’s academic ranking and difficulty level.
Osaka Metropolitan University announced on the 2nd that a major outage had hit its information infrastructure systems, including internal email and the portal site, leading to the cancellation of classes for the entire day. There is reportedly no prospect yet for when the systems will be restored.
October 2, 2026, 12:44 PM, Kyodo News
Source: 47news.jp / Original article here
What people said
It's the result of a merger between Osaka Prefecture University and Osaka City University.
Here it's "never heard of it = low ranking" lol
It's famous as a "low-education detector" school lol
That's a national university.
"Ham Univ" (nickname for Osaka Metropolitan) is just the City and Prefectural schools merged into one.
Famous as the school people end up at after failing Osaka University's entrance exam.
A popular pick for science students via the "chuki" (mid-period admissions schedule) route.
Nope, different school.
There used to be two separate universities, Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University, and they merged to form Osaka Metropolitan University.
Just hand out paper attendance slips like the old days and have students write their student ID and name on them — problem solved.
All the first-years go to the new campus, right?
That's totally possible then.
If they really need a record, just have them write their names on paper.
A university is also a company.
It'd be fine if it were just about the students, but plenty of staff — not just professors, but accounting, general affairs, security, and more — all have to do their jobs for classes to run at all.
The whole shift schedule is built around everything being digital, so suddenly switching to paper processing is a disaster.
Over on Wakatte (a university-ranking enthusiast community), someone joked "guess they're engraving a history of failure" lol (a pun off the ramen shop's name, "engrave history")
A safety school for science students who didn't make it into Osaka University.
Wonder if there's such a thing as a "ransom crony-capitalist." (a pun mashing up "ransomware" with "seishō," a businessman who profits off political connections)
It's a hensachi score that means nothing to people who've never even heard of the place.
https://www.toshin.com/daigaku/osaka-koritsu/hensachi
Hensachi runs from 62 to 70.
They can't handle attendance tracking and stuff like that.
They probably can't even print a paper roster of enrolled students at this point.
Student records are all on the cloud, and if they've also ditched physical ID cards for smartphone-based student IDs, this is a seriously bad situation.
Most national and public universities can only compete with private schools by dumping tuition that low.
Apparently that's just an urban legend.
On Jukensaron (a university entrance-exam discussion board), someone posted a hensachi chart from 30 years ago, and it's been on par with Chiba, Yokohama National, and Kyushu University this whole time.
Meiji's commerce program is a long-established name too, but Ham Univ's roots trace back to one of the old "Three Commercial Universities," ranked right alongside Hitotsubashi and Kobe.
So it's an "E-rank" school then (internet slang for the bottom tier of university rankings).
It also put an end to that pointless "which is better, City or Prefecture?" argument.
Prefecture University's engineering department only offered "chuki" and "kouki" (mid- and late-round) admission slots, which actually made it harder to get into than Osaka University.
But there's a famous story that since Osaka University's results came out during Prefecture Univ.'s "chuki" exam, students who'd gotten into Osaka University just got up and left in droves at lunchtime.
On top of that, Osaka Prefecture made schooling free all the way through grad school for its own high schoolers, so the cutoff score has been climbing in recent years.
Some departments got as high as 68, even close to 70.
Still a third-tier university at the end of the day.
But the alumni network is strong, so job placement is pretty solid too.
A safe bet if you're in STEM.
These days, if you want to go into research, you can always "launder" your way into a more prestigious grad school anyway.
Which "Sankinkoryu" are you even talking about?
If Sankinkoryu was hensachi 65 back then, Osaka City University's med school or Osaka Prefecture University's engineering school would've been more like 80 or 75.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Osaka Metropolitan University is a relatively young institution, formed in 2022 through the merger of Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University — which is largely why the thread lit up with “never heard of it” reactions. The City University side traces its lineage back to one of the old “Three Commercial Universities” (a prestigious trio alongside Tokyo University of Commerce and Kobe Higher Commercial School), but the merger and name change effectively reset its public name recognition despite that accumulated history — a nuance the article itself doesn’t convey. There’s also a theory going around that cheap tuition is what drove the school’s hensachi up, though posters in the thread pushed back, noting it’s been on par with schools like Chiba and Yokohama National for 30 years — so it’s not something a single theory can settle. As for why the outage led to the drastic step of cancelling classes for the entire day, it comes down to attendance tracking and student IDs now being fully dependent on the digital system, making a quick fallback to paper far from simple — a sign that as university administration digitizes further, it also grows more vulnerable whenever the system goes down.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Newsplus) thread “[Breaking] Major System Outage at Osaka Metropolitan University, Classes Cancelled for the Day.”
Leave a Reply