Outages in the campus e-mail system made Homecoming weekend even more eventful than planned for students and faculty.

An undetermined amount of SMU e-mail boxes were affected by the outage, which occurred late Friday afternoon during normal system maintenance, according to Information and Technology Services’ Executive Director of Administrative Computing Joe Gargiulo.

When users logged into their accounts, they were directed to an empty inbox with no new messages and all old messages gone.

“In the process of updating, information was accidentally deleted by human error – that is what caused the initial problem,” Gargiulo said.

Normally, Gargiulo said, it would only have taken two to three hours to fix the problem. However, while correcting the original issue, ITS discovered a previously unknown defect in the software.

“The latent software defect compounded the original problem, and the process turned into a 48-hour recovery,” Gargiulo said.

While e-mail inboxes appeared to have been emptied of their previously viewed messages, Gargiulo explained that the net effect of the two problems created a new headache.

“The system created a new email box that deactivated the original one and created a new inbox,” he said.

Since e-mails could still be sent, the new inboxes began to receive messages.

Accordingly, part of the recovery process involved re-activating the original inboxes and transferring any e-mail sent to the new box back to the original one.

Gargiulo said the entire process involved five ITS staffers working “around the clock” all weekend, finishing their work late Sunday night.

The system is up and functioning as normal, and Gargiulo emphasized that no e-mails were deleted or lost during the incident.

Gargiulo apologized on behalf of the entire ITS staff and said, “ITS will put procedures in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

If any students, staff or faculty have any questions about this weekend’s outage, they can visit http://www.smu.edu/its or call 214-768-4357.