Students planning on sending e-mails this weekend should consider an alternative means of communication, as the Office of Information Technology will shut down e-mail service for approximately 12 hours starting tonight at 9 p.m.
The outage, which will affect 65 percent of users, will prevent access to the Duke e-mail system--the first step among a potential series of shutdowns designed to fix "severe unknown problems" with the e-mail server.
Mike Gettes, senior technology architect and strategist for OIT, said there have been serious technological problems affecting the server since March 23, including the failures of two disks and the operating system. Tonight's outage is intended to allow technicians to fully understand the root cause of the problems.
"We don't know why [these problems] happened," Gettes said. "It was as if the moon and the stars aligned."
He added that the e-mail shutdown is a necessary step in fixing the problem. "It would be like trying to fix an engine while it is running," Gettes said. "We need to pause the engine for a moment in order to see what it looks like and from there we can correct the problem."
During another scheduled outage, planned for the near future, OIT officials will then apply what was learned from this outage to correct the situation.
According to a memo for Duke IT professionals, the school's problems are receiving the highest attention from Sun Microsystems, the vendor of both Duke's hardware and operating system. Duke experts have been speaking regularly with high-level management at Sun for progress updates.
There were a record number of phone calls in the month of March to the OIT Help Desk, thanks largely to the e-mail outages, Director of Customer Service Ginny Cake said. She added that the help desk received more traffic in March than all other months this year combined.
When questioned on whether these upcoming outages will fix all of the e-mail problems, Cake's answer was cautiously hopeful. "When I leave campus every evening and get into my car, I have taken every precaution to fix everything," she said. "But I can't guarantee that something bad won't happen.... However, with this outage there is a better guarantee for the future."
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