A WiscMail service outage occurred across campus Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving many students and staff frustrated without their regular form of communication.
Brian Rust, senior administrative program specialist for UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology, said problems with the services began Tuesday afternoon after DoIT's WiscMail team conducted a routine software update for the e-mail servers.
The update aimed to improve the maintenance and processing of the WiscMail server system.
Some time around mid-morning on Tuesday we started noticing problems with one of the servers, so we attempted some fixes and things seemed to be fairly well back to normal,"" Rust said.
""Wednesday morning we noticed problems on all of the WiscMail stores and servers, and that affected just about everybody.""
Rust said DoIT technicians uninstalled the software upgrade, went back to the previous version of software and then restored all servers, causing WiscMail services to be temporarily out of operation. No e-mails were lost in the process, he said, but large amounts of backlogged mail prolonged the outage.
Some UW-Madison students were still encountering problems with their WiscMail late in the afternoon Wednesday, according to a service outage report on the DoIT website.
""I had problems with my e-mail account all day Tuesday and Wednesday; it was horrendous,"" Josh London, a UW-Madison senior said.
""My roommate needed to double-check the time of his job interview and he couldn't do it. I had financial advisors and comedic agents trying to reach me, and I'm left with no source of communication for them.""
Rust said outages like this happen very rarely, and there is no need for students to worry about creating a ""back-up"" e-mail account.
""We fixed it, we will try to make sure it never happens again, and move on,"" he said.
Rust also said a DoIT team is in the process of looking into alternative mail systems such as GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail, but will not make any decisions until they have carefully observed how these systems have played out at other universities.
""There's a big difference between having a rare mail outage and having a system failure such that mail or an account is lost. If we lost all of your mail, [the students] would roast us.""
