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At approximately 9:00 a.m. this Wednesday, a computer communications interruption caused several network services to be interrupted.

With these services interrupted, it was virtually impossible for students to check their e-mail, the library could not check out books and administrative offices such as admissions could not access their databases. Registration also could not continue. Signs were posted around the library indicating that the computers were not working. Other signs were posted in the dorm residences and around campus notifying students who were supposed to register that registration would be pushed back until noon.

Associate Registrar Tom Steenwyk described the situation. “When it first happened, you feel helpless – it’s like you can’t go and you’re looking at a line starting to form, and you just wonder ‘how long is this going to be?’”

After making contact with the Information Technology Center, it was decided to tell students to come back at noon. By this time, some 60 students had lined up, some having already waited for an hour.

“I thought people were going to be a little more angry,” said Steenwyk. “Calvin students seem to roll with things like this, and I was pretty surprised.” According to freshman Carolyn Kooy, who stood in line for an hour, “we couldn’t get mad at them” since cookies were provided and “they were nice about it – they were very apologetic.”

According to Henry DeVries, vice president for information services, “we’re still not sure what was the cause – whether it was a spike in e-mail traffic or a spam attack.”

DeVries said that the main e-mail server, URSA, was overloaded this morning. This in turn caused UBETCHA, the server which stores all of the files on campus, to act up.

Jeff Greenfield, Calvin’s system engineer, webmaster and postmaster, said that the problem could have been caused by one of two things: “a piece of network hardware failing or some kind of attack from the Internet — but our traffic patterns don’t show us anything that could lead us to that conclusion.” In order to ensure that this does not happen again, Greenfield said that the suspect piece of hardware will be replaced next month.

“The only thing we know for sure,” said Helpdesk Team Leader Brian Mellis, “is that TCP/IP [the protocol for communication between networked computers] service was interrupted and that ... made it difficult or impossible for people to use servers such as URSA or to use the college databases.”

All network services were restored by noon, said DeVries.Investigation into what happened and what precipitated the interruption is ongoing.

“This is the first time we’ve had this kind of occurrence,” said DeVries. “It’s gotten our attention in a pretty big way.”