Some 6,000 e-mail accounts were out of service most of Tuesday after a post office that serves the accounts experienced a failure that resulted, among other things, in a progressive corruption of data, said Rob Carter, director of systems architecture at the Office of Information Technology. He added that it had never happened before at Duke.
The chain of events began Monday afternoon, and e-mail accounts were expected to be restored by 9 p.m. Tuesday. One out of eight e-mail accounts was affected.
"With any luck, by the time when most people get up in the morning, we'll be tired, but everyone should be back in operation," Carter said.
All incoming e-mails were held in queue on the servers and were expected to be delivered once operation began again--although at a slow pace because of the high volume.
"Fortunately, the backup system worked as it was supposed to," Carter said.
Duke community members can access updates of the situation at http://www.oit.duke.edu/helpdesk/service/acpub.html.
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