Network Outages Create Chaos for Panicked Students

Students cramming for impending exams and racing the clock to hand in final projects on time faced an unforeseen obstacle Monday afternoon: the network went down.

The network’s descent began gradually, with “scattered reports of slowness throughout the day,” according to Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98.

Service was interrupted on the ICE instructional system in the late morning, Davis wrote in an e-mail.

Web services followed mid-afternoon, and at 4:30 p.m., all Faculty of Arts and Sciences Unix systems—including course websites and e-mail service—went out, he said.

For many students, the inability to send e-mails or print papers on network printers was an unwelcome addition to late reading period tensions.

Brian M. Greenberg ’04 said he was settling in for a productive afternoon filled with lecture videos for Science B-23, “The Human Organism” when the outage struck.

But for Greenberg, that was only the beginning of his technological woes. His take-home final for Computer Science 161, “Operating Systems”—which was to be distributed online—was also delayed due to the network crash.

“The TFs were running around and nobody seemed to have any idea what to do,” he said.

Across campus, a panic settled over a roomful of first-years in Holworthy as they attempted to access course websites and check e-mail.

Isabelle C. Burtan ’06 said she and her roommates first noticed websites taking unusually long to load, before realizing that their e-mail was also no longer working.

“It’s just a major inconvenience,” said Burtan.

Burtan said she was unable to contact a teacher to cancel a meeting, and her roommates were unable to get information regarding everything from chemistry exams to biology answer keys.

During the outage, Davis said, the network’s file storage system became unavailable.

“The Web server and e-mail and login could not access the files [that] were there,” he said.

But the overall impact of the outage was limited to temporary unavailability, he said, with no reports of lost data.

“At this point in time, we do not have a definitive answer on the cause, but we know they involve a series of both hardware and software failures,” he said.

“The issue is still under investigation, and we are working with our vendor (HP/Compaq) to find out more about the situation.”

Though the network was back online by 6:30 p.m. Monday, some network problems continued yesterday.

Certain web services, including webmail, were intermittently unavailable between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., Davis said.

—Staff writer Nathaniel A. Smith can be reached at nsmith@fas.harvard.edu.