Well, a couple of months ago, NTU was attacked by a horde of dragons. They bore their offsprings in the campus grounds, thus the “dragon babies” who destroyed the IT infrastructure.

The “dragon babies” is my term for babies born in the year of the dragon. The year of the dragon is believed to be auspicious to the Chinese, hence a lot of babies were born in that particular year.

The majority of the university admission this year comes from those born in 1988, which happens to be the year of the dragon. In turn, majority of these are girls, since the guys are currently serving the National Service and will only be admitted to the university 2 years later.

Figuring out the connection is simple from here. A lot of kids were born in the year of the dragon (1988), more than any other year. The university admits 1988 babies this year. They even increased the university places this year to accommodate them.

In turn, the IT system became overloaded as the dragon freshmen (and the seniors) attempted to access the system at the same time. The edveNTUre system, which is NTU’s e-learning portal, is especially affected, with the system being down for a couple of days earlier this week. This is probably because edveNTUre is where the freshmen (and seniors alike) have to log on to to get and print their lecture notes, so like it or not, they have to access the system.

BTW, this is just my speculations. The university hasn’t said anything formal about the matter yet. In fact, the university did upgrade the system earlier this year (presumably to accommodate the influx of users). It is not clear whether the downtime was because of a flaw in the upgrade, or the inability of the system to cope with the influx of users.

Hope this answers your question!

=)