A campus technology spokesperson said that the problem which triggered the longest-ever WebMail outage earlier this week has been isolated and temporarily solved.

“”Things seem to be a lot more stable now,”” University Information Technology Services Senior Director Limell Lawson said.

The problem, Lawson said, was with the “”front-end servers,”” the computers that manage WebMail log-in and other services. The servers, never meant to handle the high volume of users they currently manage, crashed unexpectedly early Monday, she said.

Although the outage occurred concurrently with the opening of CatMail, the new student email system operated by Google, Lawson said the new system was only one of many things to push WebMail to the breaking point.

Nevertheless, UITS officials shut down the CatMail migration after only 36 hours to ensure that the WebMail crash was not related to it. The delay caused no major problems for the migration and will not result in a pushback of the final date to transfer to CatMail, Dec. 19, Lawson said.

Still, she said, “”we would have liked to leave that window.””

For the time being, back-up servers have been activated to enable WebMail to operate until the disabled ones can be repaired.