On the first day of the fall semester, the MySacState portal began experiencing serious problems at about 9:20 am. At 11:45 am a redirect; page allowing users to directly access essential services like SacCT and email was put in place, but service to the MySacState portal itself was not restored until 5:20 pm that same day. Other than finals week, the MySacState portal could not have gone down at a worse time for faculty and students, so we'd like to provide an explanation of what has been done to prevent such problems in the future. Working all day with the portal support vendor, we discovered that the problem was caused by an unexpectedly high number of people using the portal at the same time. Although our portal was heavily load tested before being implemented, the process of predicting how new applications and increased use will affect the system is complex. After carefully analyzing the problem, we worked with the vendor to adjust several key parameters of the software, resulting in optimal performance of the web portal even under heavier load than we experienced on the first day of classes. We are working with the vendor on further optimization, to reduce the possibility of any future outages. In addition, we are taking steps to automate the process of bringing up a; redirect; page in the event of any future portal outage. This means that users should always be able to get to needed resources without delay, even if the portal is having problems. We welcome your suggestions for further enhancements to the operation of MySacState at irtfeedback@csus.edu.