Hundreds of students have found themselves unable to access their School of Arts and Sciences Webmail accounts over the past few days.
Although some have been able to send and receive e-mails without interruption, for other College students, even logging in has often proved impossible.
This is now the second major disruption to SAS Webmail services since the start of the semester, and the fourth problem since Aug. 24.
The root of Sunday's problem was a partial outage on one of SAS Webmail's two redundant servers, according to SAS IT Director John Yates.
An accelerator program on the server stopped running and caused connections from that one server to fail, resulting in a loss of service for roughly half of SAS Webmail users, he said.
Each school operates its own Webmail server, and is responsible for both its continual upkeep and maintenance.
He added that those using e-mail clients other than Webmail experienced no outage.
"The accelerator program had never spontaneously died before," Yates said. "We are looking into why it happened and have put in place code to monitor it and restart it if it dies."
However, despite Yates' insistence that preventive measures are being put in place, the incident begs the question of why SAS Webmail services seem to be much less stable than those of the other schools at Penn.
College students were frustrated by the interruptions to their Webmail access.
"It said my username and password wasn't right when I tried to access my account," College freshman Dustin Blank said. "It was annoying because I wanted to get started on my work."
The outage caused even greater problems for others.
"I missed an appointment," College freshman Karim Abdel-Latif said. "You just don't know how to go through your day without all these important announcements coming through e-mail."
However, Abdel-Latif added that he understood that technical glitches are sometimes unavoidable and the problem was not of too much concern to him -- as long as it doesn't repeat itself.
"If it's a one time thing then that's ok," he said. "But if it keeps happening then that's a problem."
E-mail errors - One of two servers went down Sunday - Half of Webmail users affected - 2nd incident this semester
