For those of you not at MIT, something extreme happened Thursday: MIT email servers went down.  I first noticed around 6:30 am (I happened to be up from being woken up to give someone a ride, not from staying up, by the way), and what surprised and impressed me was that by 7:15 am, MIT email services had already posted an update saying they were aware of the problem and fixing it.  After sleeping a bit more and waking up at a more reasonable hour, I found that email was still down.  Various servers went back up throughout the day, but just my luck that the server I’m on was the last to go back online (around 8:15 pm).  Like most people, I have a gmail account, but this put me without my main email account for more than 12 hours.  Not a big problem (unlike when my laptop went down), and I applaud MIT’s quick response.  The whole thing reminded me of a similar event though…

Way back in Fall 2005, when I was a junior at Rice, Hurricane Rita came to town.  Meaning all lines of communication got jammed from the traffic.  The day Rita became a Cat 5 and Rice decided to shut down, also coincided with a massive email failure on the undergraduate servers.  Turns out the servers were already overloaded and the outage probably would have occurred anyway, but even as people left Houston en masse (due to the traffic, you were likely to make it only partway out of town before running out of gas), I remember many Rice students were more worried about their emails.  The next week, the school newspaper had a good cartoon of the situation: on the left, a Houstonian sees a news report on TV and goes “Oh no, Hurricane Rita”; on the right, a Rice student sees a computer and goes “Oh no, my email”.  It caused quite a bit of trouble with Rice emergency preparations, too, since Rice did not require alternative emergency contact info (e.g. cell numbers) back then, and all announcements were being sent through email, meaning most undergraduates did not get notice of Rice shutting down, classes or nighttime tests being postponed, etc until Rita had already passed.  Not having any email then was a huge problem as I scoured campus trying to find my sister so we could get off campus.  Rita ended up missing Houston, but Rice learned to be better prepared in notifying students (though they then botched up in helping graduate students during Hurricane Ike).  I probably learned something about priorities in all that mess, too.

Anyway, it’s summer, and one day of no email turned out to be okay since I just spent the day doing research anyway (some might say no email makes you more productive).  Luckily, IST ended up fixing the email servers so that all the emails in queue were retrievable as well, meaning I did not have to wonder if I missed some important email during the day.  Hopefully, the day ended up going just as smoothly for the rest of you as well.