Erratic E-mail Pesters Students

Busy-bee Harvard students aren’t used to having a lot of downtime. But yesterday the College’s electronic hive lost its buzz.

E-mail service went down for several hours yesterday, plunging the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) back to the dark ages of the early 1990s.

“What is the deal with FAS email?” Ben A. Sprague ’06 asked in an e-mail to the Pfoho open list. Larry Levine, the chief information officer for FAS, explained that heavy use of the e-mail system has caused it to slow down.

“Recently, FAS e-mail has been slow or unavailable during late afternoon hours, and has been unavailable at other times,” Levine wrote in an e-mail. “Ever increasing usage loads on the FAS e-mail systems...have severely challenged these systems.”

In addition to excessive traffic, the network was also plagued by attacks from a virus called Denial of Service, which Levine said impedes e-mail system performance.

The dual stressors combined to form a perfect storm that washed out e-mail access for many students and faculty.

Harvard’s IT staff is “working literally around the clock” to calm the electronic waters, according to Levine.

While service will continue to improve, Levine said long-term solutions will be some time in coming.

FAS Computing Services plans to move e-mail folders onto a new server to alleviate the problems with the current system.

“The process will take several days, but as accounts are migrated we will see improvements as the load on the old storage system is relieved,” Levine wrote.

In the meantime, stymied students vented their frustration. Emma M. Lind ’09, who is also a Crimson editor, created a Facebook group: “When my email doesn’t work, my life shuts down completely.”

“I’m pissed,” Lind wrote in the group description. “And dependent on technology.”

Sprague’s e-mail echoed this sentiment.

“These downtimes are not only annoying, but are causing some serious problems for me (and others in similar situations, I’m sure) in terms of receiving and responding to emails regarding jobs, summer plans, etc.,” Sprague wrote.

Weld resident Roy R. Shi ’09 took a more measured view of the outage.

“Servers go down, that’s just the way they work,” Shi said. “It’s really hard to keep continuous service up. But on the other hand it is kind of unacceptable for the outage to go on for this long and affect this many people.”

Students also complained that not all e-mail clients were equally affected by the outage.

“MacMail, Thunderbird, Webmail, Eudora, Outlook, etc., are much more sophisticated clients than Pine, which is relatively very simple,” Levine wrote in an e-mail. “Pine has much less overhead in communicating with a mail server, hence during times of a stressed e-mail system, Pine is more likely to perform more normally.”

He added that moving the e-mail accounts is part of a much larger solution.

“We have been planning more comprehensive improvements to the FAS e-mail system...the execution of which will take several months,” Levine wrote.

“We so very much look forward to giving the FAS a more robust, fast, and reliable set of services and network then has been previously experienced. As service providers, providing failing services is painful.”

­—Staff writer Jillian M. Bunting can be reached at jbunting@fas.harvard.edu.