The run-up to finals week took a turn for the worse last Wednesday when a UAF e-mail server malfunctioned, at first causing extremely slow webmail access for all UAF users, which eventually resulted in a complete outage lasting from Thursday afternoon until midday Friday.

"This couldn't have happened at a worse time of year," said Steve Smith, chief information technology officer at the Division of Computing and Communications. "It appears that no data were lost and no messages lost."

"There was a real possibility that we could have lost all that information," Smith said.

Two teams of technicians worked around the clock to correct the problem, which was the result of a server failure, Smith said. Experts from Hewlett Packard, the manufacturer of the server, helped with consultation through the process.

"We were doing a standard backup procedure on Wednesday, and something went wrong there," Smith said. UAF's e-mail server is backed up every day so data can be restored in the event of a malfunction such as this one. "It wasn't caused by an attack or a virus or anything. It was a pretty mundane but devastating hardware failure," Smith said, though he noted that DC&C did not know the exact reason for the failure.

"I can't even check my e-mail, I was like 'What's going on?'" said sophomore Alexis Bowman, a student assistant at the Registrar's Office. "We're paying money to use those computers, these services, and we can't even use the e-mail."

"It's extremely difficult," agreed her coworker, Mike Wyant, a graduate student in linguistics.

The computing help desk logged 46 calls just concerning the e-mail outage, but the actual volume was probably much larger because only calls in which a help desk consultant speaks with a caller are logged. Because the help desk's voice mail message informed callers of the outage, consultants talked to only a fraction of those who called.

"Our call volume has probably doubled," said a consultant at the help desk. "I'm not too happy about it myself, because there's a lot of things on my webmail that I need to use."

UAF webmail is home to about 24,000 e-mail accounts, some of which are inactive or seldom used by students who prefer other e-mail providers. However, staff and faculty have no choice for their work-related e-mailing, and many teachers rely heavily on webmail for contacting students or even receiving homework assignments.

Senior journalism major Rachel Dutil panicked after not being able to access a news story she had saved on webmail.

"I had the only copy of the story on my UAF e-mail," Dutil said. "I just kept trying and trying." Dutil was able to get into the account before webmail was shut down Thursday.

"I had succumbed to the fact that I was just going to have to start from scratch."

Many students were unaware of the problems.

"I use it normally to receive e-mails from teachers," said senior Dan Adamczak. Adamczak had not heard that the UAF e-mail was down.

The two and a half days of e-mail problems ended Friday around 12:30 p.m. as e-mails flooded back onto computer screens.

"With something like this, the e-mail going down is like the phone service going down," Smith said, "A lot of work just comes to a halt."