Students frantically trying to log into their fickle UF Webmail accounts can rest easy — UF Information Technology has solved the case.
Webmail users began experiencing problems logging into their accounts Sunday when engineers brought a storage subsystem back online, and UFIT discovered a significant amount of corrupted data. About 4,000 student accounts were affected, leaving them unable to access emails for about two days.
Students like Jennifer Miles, a 21-year-old UF building construction junior, were met with a message stating the server was unavailable when they tried to log in.
Miles said she was frustrated after trying to log in five or six times in a row. She got error messages each time.
“I had no idea what was going on with it,” she said. “UF really didn’t seem like it knew why it went down, either.”
IT infrastructure manager Iain Moffat wrote in an email that data had to be restored from backups to reconstruct the affected email accounts.
Moffat said about half of the affected accounts were recovered at 9 p.m. Monday. The other half came back online in segments Tuesday.
UFIT communications manager Tracy Gale said the university’s campus is large and complex, and UFIT leadership is constantly looking at solutions for IT issues like system enhancements and product upgrades.
“UFIT does everything possible, resource-wise, to proactively maintain and prevent system outages,” she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 3/26/2014 under the headline "Shibboleth strikes again: UFIT solves Webmail issues"]
