As you are aware a generator stopped working during a scheduled power outage at Lethbridge College on Aug. 10 resulting in an ITS failure. This resulted in the short-term loss of all student email accounts, totaling over 17,000 with alumni included. After all is said and done, 4441 accounts cannot be restored. Some of those are alumni accounts, 952 are those of current students. (583 returning students and 369 first-time students)
We are working with the affected students to facilitate this process and answer their questions and concerns. There are now new emails in place for each of these students. We are also working with student services to make sure that each student has the information needed to facilitate their arrival at the college for Fall 2013.
From what we know, here’s what transpired resulting in the loss of email accounts. During the scheduled power outage Saturday a generator running the ITS building failed. The Cummings service team was immediately called to site to repair the generator. This specific generator had been serviced in mid-July and given a clean bill of health at that time. As a result of the loss of the generator, the batteries in the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) system drained and the data centre went dark. The UPS system had been serviced in mid-June and it too was given a clean bill of health.
The generator remained unstable until 2 p.m. Sunday which is when ITS staff were able to begin working on restoring the systems. It’s our belief that during the event one UPS failed and damaged hardware that housed student data irreparably. The damaged hardware contained all the student email accounts. We were able to restore 75 per cent of the accounts with our system back-ups.
I would like to thank you for your patience as we worked through the process of restoring email accounts.
Sincerely,
Matt Norton
Director, Information and Technology Services
Notice: student email unavailable week of Aug. 12
Aug. 12, 2013 - During this past weekend’s planned power outage, a generator issue resulted in the loss of some services to college systems including e-mail. As a result, all student e-mail accounts must be restored. ITS is working to bring this service back up as soon as possible, but while repairs are underway, student email will be unavailable.
We anticipate having all student accounts restored this week. More information will follow as timelines are determined. We apologize for this disruption and are working to bring this back up as quickly as possible.
All updates and additional information will be posted to this news story, to Twitter and to Facebook. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.