The MSU Webmail service didn’t crash, however, the system was suffering a severe slowdown of delivery and checking e-mail. Katherine Ball, Academic Computing and Network Services communications manager, said the problem occurred shortly after the e-mail system performed a routine backup of its nearly six terabytes, or 170 million files, of data.

“The amount of information we were backing up created a bottle neck when we were recovering file space, taking away the speed from sending and receiving mail,” Ball said.

This became a problem for some students needing the system for classwork.

“I had to get on (e-mail) to contact my group for class,” said Jennifer Ruiz, telecommunication, information studies and media senior. Ruiz ended up using the social networking site Facebook.com to contact her group.

ACNS noticed the problem at around 8:40 a.m. Tuesday, Ball said, shortly after the routine backup process was completed and began working with their vendor on fixing it immediately. ACNS found the problem before any complaints came in, she said.

“This has happened before, but the measures we normally take to clear space are not working this time,” Ball said. “We’re looking to clear up space to allocate towards sending and receiving.”

Files sent during the slowdown have been delayed but are still being sent.

The system is expected to be up by Wednesday morning, though a definite time is not known.

The backups are performed to secure files for disaster recovery purposes. ACNS is looking into other backup systems to prevent this problem in the future.

“We aren’t quite sure what those are yet, our team is working on that now,” Ball said.