A hardware glitch caused School of Arts and Sciences Webmail to go down for at least five hours yesterday afternoon.
SAS IT Executive Director Ira Winston said that a faulty fiber-loop board -- a piece of hardware that links data from outside computer networks to the SAS Webmail server -- initiated a lengthy automatic-restart sequence that shut down the service.
As frustrated students attempted to access their e-mail accounts, SAS computing staff scrambled to restore the service.
SAS computing staff detected the problem soon after it occurred, Winston said, adding that technicians from Sun Microsystems -- SAS Webmail's hardware provider -- were brought in.
The Sun Microsystems technicians arrived at 4:30 p.m. and replaced the broken fiber-loop board, Winston said.
The crash had a range of impacts on students.
College senior Jared Small, co-captain of the Purple Headed Yogurt Slingers intramural volleyball team, said he was unable to communicate with his teammates and thus could not finalize a roster for the team's game that night.
Yet Small said he was not too distraught about the outage.
College sophomore Dan Atkins, like Small, said he did not experience too much inconvenience from the outage, but he added that others might not have been so lucky.
"It didn't affect me too much," Atkins said. "But I could see how it could be a big burden on others."
During the fall semester, SAS Webmail faltered four times. Over winter break, School of Arts and Sciences Computing installed upgrades intended to stabilize the system.
Yesterday's incident was the first extended crash for SAS Webmail this semester.
Students who have their SAS e-mail automatically forwarded to other accounts such as Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo, were still able to receive it.
SAS Computing officials posted an announcement that Webmail was down on the e-mail login portal.
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