WTF? R U Serious? MIT Email down?

Ok, ok, not to worry. Only 20% of the MIT community actually felt the email outage. The crash of the central email server only hit one fifth of the subscribers – but from one of the most prestigious tech universities in the nation any outage seems like a huge issue. The MIT press office offered the apology by the VP for Information Services and Technology

Personally and on behalf of the entire staff of IS&T, I apologize and thank you for your patience and understanding. Our staff worked around the clock for several days to ensure the integrity of all email in the system, but we recognize that the length of this disruption has been totally unacceptable.

The outage didn't result in any loss of email for the 20,000 or so "very active" subscribers that rely on MIT's servers for their email delivery. Of course a technical explanation for the loss is available online for those interested – the transparency is excellent, though we wouldn't expect anything less to come from a community of loveable geeks.

Some stats were offered by the release: there are over 20,000 very active users of the MIT email service who rely on the MIT servers to deliver their email messages, some 10 million spam messages are thwarted from delivery each day, while 4 million messages make it to their final destination each day. MIT's Information Services and Technology took the opportunity to mention that they're working on solutions for problems that may arise for the email system, and that they'll be augmenting the current system to be able to handle these unpredicted (yet catastrophic) events as well as some issues that come with problems stemming from things like power outages due to NSTAR construction.

Image of people checking their email, because it was working, from Flickr user dinghyman