According to Mike Carlin of UMBC’s OIT office, 25% of the campus’ inboxes were rendered inaccesible, after a server collapsed completely at 6 a.m. this morning. According to OIT, the collapse effects 12,000 active UMBC webmail accounts belonging to students, staff, and faculty.

The problems was resolved this afternoon  and e-mails were moved to a new base from which they could slowly trickle to their original destinations. Over one million sent e-mails were held up by the server collapse and Carlin predicts that it won’t be until Sunday that all these messages will reach their intended destinations. No data will be lost — though sent e-mails will take longer than usual to reach inboxes.  

Webmail had been suffering from sporadic collapses for the past week , said Carlin. These collapses would last for a few minutes and overtime became longer and more frequent. Originally, OIT had found that a bug was causing these issues. Later, the initial problem was resolved when a patch was used to correct issues with the program’s software caused by a bug. Once the first problem was solved, a second more difficult problem was revealed (this one eventually took down the server) and was solved today.

For the complete story, check out the DoIt News blog.