Summary: The University is experiencing problems with the MS Exchange servers. Approximately a third of faculty, staff and administrators on the South Orange Campus are currently without access to email. All faculty staff and administrators will experience intermittent email outages as we work to resolve this issue.
The campus Microsoft Exchange email system provides email services to faculty, staff and administrators. Last night at approximately 1AM, the campus Microsoft email server experienced a technical problem causing services to stop. All incoming and outgoing email was queued awaiting delivery. The servers were restarted this morning, and some email service was restored for the majority of MS Exchange users.
Unfortunately, one of the three file systems serving MS Exchange users on the South Orange Campus was corrupted during this incident. For this reason, about 500 MS Exchange email users on the South Orange Campus are still without email service. In addition, the ActiveSync that pushes email to users’ cell phones and other devices was in the affected file system, so for those users who can access their email, access is currently limited to MS Outlook or Outlook Web Access (a.k.a. “OWA”, or “Webmail”).
The University IT Services team is working with Microsoft support to restore the corrupted files. This is taking significantly longer than anticipated due to the size of the files, the time required to repair them, and the need to proceed carefully so as not to inadvertently lose any user’s email. At this time, IT Services and Microsoft believe the repair will be successful and no users’ email will be lost. In the meantime, all MS Exchange email users, including users at the Law School, will experience brief intermittent email service outages as Microsoft and IT Services work on the problem. Further updates will be posted as we have additional information.
Steve Landry, CIO
Thank you for your hard work to correct this problem. I’m sure it’s been a rough and long couple of days. Best of luck!
Thank you, Tara. SGL
It is already 2:45 p.m. and server is still unavailable
Yuri, try again in a few minutes. The system is coming back up as we speak.
While I understand this has been a difficult time for the IT management team, your consistent failure to meet your own stated deadlines is quite frustrating. I get it, these things take time to fix and unexpected obstacles come up, but I think your team can use this experience as a lesson for setting deadlines when the unexpected occurs. If you tell us it may take up to 48 hours to solve, and you solve it in 24 hours, everyone feels much more satisfied with the response. But when you tell us it will be solved by 7am, then 10am-12pm, then 1:30pm, then you come back at 3pm and tell us it will take “several hours”, it leaves us with the feeling that you have failed us with your response.
Everyone truly appreciates your hard work with this outage, and the fact that you are sending continued updates is a fabulous tool for the community, however it should be ensured going forward that estimates should not be given unless you are confident that the work can be completed in this timeframe.
Point well taken, Michael. We were providing the community with the best information we had at the time, and had experts from Microsoft helping with this restoration, so we had good advice on what we needed to do and how long it should take under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, in each step we ran into unexpected obstacles, and in our communication we did not include any time for those contingencies. Thanks for your suggestions. – - SGL
It’s been nearly two days I still don’t have access to the email.
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