A “severe hardware failure” crippled the University’s Webmail system this weekend, preventing faculty, staff and students from accessing their University e-mail accounts.
Technicians had not rectified the problem as of press time Sunday. University officials expect Webmail to be up and running Monday morning.
The GW Virtual Helpdesk reported that a “catastrophic failure of the disk controller used on the student mail store” caused the problem. Although GW’s system protects Webmail against “normal failures … it cannot protect against a catastrophic failure of the entire disk array.”
“(Webmail failures) are why I use Hotmail now,” junior Jinaan Elias said. “I’m a junior and I haven’t used Webmail in two years. Hotmail doesn’t go down.”
Information Systems Services administrators were unavailable for comment over the weekend.
-Julie Gordon and Alex Kingsbury
