When there was a power failure Monday in the Student Services Data Center room, all of the university’s computers were affected.

According to Chat Chatterji, assistant vice president in Information Technology Services, a blown fuse caused a circuit breaker, which protects the circuit the computer’s running on, to lose power.

Even though the university’s Web server is backed up by a battery power pack that handles the mainframe computers, which is then backed up by a diesel generator, the failure did cause the PAWS system to temporarily shut down for about an hour and a half.

“We had to restart it, repair any files, and then the system would automatically check to repair any other files to bring the system back up,” said Chatterji.

According to Chatterji, the battery power and generator that backs up the computers works well, as during the failure all the other servers besides PAWS were operational.

Gary Reed, director of the Physical Plant, said that planned outages are announced in advance through fax and e-mail so preparations and arrangements can be made. He added that necessary outages are planned and communicated well in advance of their occurrence. Yet even though Monday’s failure was not planned, power was restored within a half hour.

“We try to minimize electrical disruption to campus, but some inconvenience is unavoidable,” said Reed.

Other than the instance on Monday, Chatterji assured that there are no problems causing slow downs with the Web servers. The number of hits from foreign sites, called denial of service attacks that caused slow down in Internet connection a few weeks ago have been fixed, he said.

“We blocked the foreign sites. At one time it was a problem, but it’s not at all anymore,” Chatterji said.

Reed said that the proposed $4 million dollar feeder cable upgrade project, which would reduce the amount of outages on campus, is already underway with phase one of the project, and design stages of phase two are currently being planned.

“We want to thank the campus for their patience and understanding,” he said.