> But if you had more information on the outage on your end and how you fixed it, that is always helpful.
Actually there was not outage at our end at all. Instead there seemes to be a peering issue on one of the Internet nodes. Our temporary workaround was not to announce the IP addresses in that network anymore, so that all traffic uses another route.
Possibly, one of the Internet switches in your university network has an outdated routing table? Just a guess, because I unfortunately lack a valid explanation...
> Is there an export option to run a survey on a different server as a backup
That depends on several criteria:
https://www.soscisurvey.de/en/local
> in case this happens while running a survey
Fortunately, the Internet usually works fine (most of the time), and our servers are also quite stable. But something may always happen. This is true for our server as well as for any other server.
The "connection closed" however seems like a different problem. As your question implies some IT affinity, you may try a traceroute to www.soscisurvey.de and see if that works. The network analysis of your browser may also yield helpful information.