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Webmail service interrupted yesterday

Tufts students were unable to access their Tufts Webmail accounts for several hours yesterday due to an equipment failure.

"Basically our Trumpeter e-mail cluster suffered a hardware failure," Dawn Irish, the manager of Information Technology Training, said.

The malfunction occurred around 12:30 p.m. and the University Information Technology (UIT) staff worked to repair the problem all afternoon, immediately contacting the hardware vendor to "get them on-site as soon as possible," Irish said.

Still, many students reported being inconvenienced by the outage, even if it was just for a few hours.

Sophomore Sarah Schreiber found the inability to access her e-mail caused confusion with her activities for the day.

"It was really annoying. I had to check my

e-mail for work and I couldn't get through. I had a meeting...and I couldn't find out what time it started," she said.

The system's failure came at an inopportune time, with students y in the midst of midterms. "Everyone around me was stressing out about it," sophomore Sarah Small said.

On the part of UIT, Irish said her staff made sure to notify students of the malfunction to reduce inconveniences.

"When we realized it would be down for more than just a few minutes, we did do a broadcast voicemail message to all campuses just letting people know that it was down and that we were aware of the problem," she said.

Around 4:00 p.m., the problem was corrected, and students were once again granted access to their e-mail accounts.

This appears to have been an isolated incident, unlikely to become a permanent problem, according to Irish.

Tufts' last e-mail outage occurred in April 2005, but it wasn't caused by a hardware failure, Irish said.

"This issue as far as I've known has never happened before," Irish said. "Certainly we will take precautions to ensure that this type of incident doesn't happen again."

According to Irish, no e-mails were lost during the outage.

- Lilly Riber