Fire Downs FAS Computer Servers

A small electrical fire in the server room of the Science Center caused an evacuation of the building and a shutdown of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) servers last Friday.

At approximately 4:05 p.m., a fire alarm went off in the Science Center, and the building was quickly evacuated. Electrical power was cut to the server room after an electrical short circuit caused a fire in the power supply unit, FAS Computer Services spokeswoman Elizabeth Hess said in a statement sent via e-mail. Hess could not be reached for comment over the weekend.

The fire caused disruption to the FAS e-mail, Web, database, and network services, which were down for several hours after power was cut to the server room. According to Hess, the systems were restored by 9:10 p.m. that evening.

Megan M. Roberts ’10, who was in a life sciences lab when the alarm went off, said “there was not much confusion” as students, faculty, staff evacuated the Science Center. “We just followed our TF [teaching fellow] and waited outside for 5 or 10 minutes, at which point our TF told us we could go, since it was a Friday afternoon,” she said.

Since the server room is located in the basement of the Science Center, the cause of the fire was not immediately evident to those in the building.

Not all students said they were inconvenienced by the server disruptions.

George A. Thampy ’10 said he attempted to check his e-mail Friday afternoon, but eventually gave up.

“I pounded the refresh button on my browser, and it told me the server was not online,” he said. “I took it as a sign that I should be going out and doing greater things.”

But Julie A. Duncan ’09 had a paper for History of Science 97b, the department’s sophomore tutorial, due at 5 p.m. on Friday. But when she tried to submit her paper electronically at 4:30 p.m., she received an error message saying that her e-mail could not connect to the server, she said. Thinking it was due to a bad Internet connection, she kept trying, as her deadline drew ever closer, not knowing that the FAS server was down.

“I was definitely freaking out,” Duncan said. “I kept trying until I realized it was 4:58 p.m. Luckily one of my roommates had Gmail”—Google’s e-mail program—“so we put my paper on a flash drive, and she sent it through her account. Crisis averted.”

Students in Computer Science 51, the second part of the department’s introductory courses, received a 24-hour extension on a project that had also been due at 5 p.m. Friday.

“There were some issues with the Science Center and the [server] machines a few hours before the assignment was due, and many people were affected,” Head TF Thomas G. Carriero wrote in a e-mail. “Things appear to be back up and running, so now you can get back to work :-).”

While the Science Center was evacuated and firefighters investigated the source of the alarm, police were on the scene for traffic control.

Friday’s network troubles marked the second time this academic year that there had been a major disruption to the FAS servers. When the servers crashed in November, it took seven hours before they were restored to full operation.