WebMail and some other university Internet services were down for a couple hours this afternoon due to a power loss in the University Information Technology Services data center.

Computers in the data center are home to such services as D2L, Student Link, university e-mail, and some administrative computing systems. A UITS official said the power to the data center was cut off for about 20 minutes around noon during routine maintenance.

Both an on-site generator and Tucson Electric Power supply power for the center, the former of which was switched off for the maintenance. Although the center continued to receive power from TEP, it shut down, said the official, senior director for UITS frontline services Limell Lawson.

“”We were like, ‘wow, that’s weird,'”” she said.

WebMail was back up by 2:50 p.m., and other services continued to re-activate in following hours. Lawson said she expected all services to be back online by 5:00 p.m.

A TEP spokesperson said he was unaware of the problem and concurred with Lawson’s speculation that the problem was internal and not related with TEP.

Lawson said she was unsure what happened but that more information would be posted to the UITS Web site as it came in.