A power outage led to some interruptions in network connectivity on campus

A power outage at Penn's data center has led to network interruptions across campus.

Just before 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning, a UPennAlert was sent to students reporting a “major power outage” between 3400 and 3600 Walnut Street. 

The outage was later determined to occur at 3401 Walnut Street, which houses Penn Information Systems and Computing. The Division of Public Safety said it occurred when a building contractor working on Walnut Street accidentally struck a major power line. This led to a power outage at several buildings on campus including Van Pelt Library, the Franklin Building and the Annenberg Center. Following the outage, all hardware in 3401 Walnut Street was also shut down.

While power was back on in 3401 Walnut Street around 11 a.m., the building's uninterruptible power supply — an electrical apparatus that works as a back-up power source — remained offline until around 2 p.m., when ISC began to restore all of its services.

Data center networking was up and running by 3:35 p.m., but many students reported continued disruptions in Penn’s email services.

ISC runs the University's general email server (@upenn.edu), which remained running this morning, but individual schools' email servers could have been impacted by the power outage. The School of Arts and Sciences Computing reported that its email services had to be shut down around 8 a.m. due to the power outage.

SAS email service was fully restored as of 4:30 p.m., but smaller individual servers may still be experiencing issues.

This is a developing story that was last updated on June 21 at 6 p.m. Check back for updates.