By Shannon M. Davis
Arizona Daily Wildcat
A brief power outage in the UA's Center for Computing and Information Technology left campus computers in short supply for several hours yesterday morning.
"A wrong switch in the machine room was hit during a routine safety check", said Linda Drew, manager of information systems for CCIT. The Student Information Services system was down from about 10 a.m. to noon, halting add/drop procedures at the Student Service Center for several hours. The center closed during the outage and resumed regular operations after lunch.
Financial Records Systems also was shut down during the outage. Joe Carrillo, a management information systems and operation management junior, was unable to get his financial aid check.
"They told me to just come back tomorrow," he said.
Drew said this is one of the busiest times for many of the campus-wide computer systems, and the outage made many of those systems temporarily inaccessible.
"User support in CCIT was flooded with calls while staff worked to get all of the nearly 30 affected systems back up," Drew said.
Student Information Services, the library's SABIO system and many of the systems used by faculty and staff also were shut down.
The good news, Drew said, was that the UA's new computer system, u.arizona.edu, was not affected.
Drew said, "It was built with a buffering system that can withstand temporary power outages."