Oh, surprise surprise. Warwick University’s IT facilities are broken again.

From http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/aboutus/message/

A major power failure affecting much of campus occurred at about 4:30 am on 9th November and power was off for over an hour. It affected both University House and the IT Services building where the University’s two main computer rooms are housed.

[snip – the UPS generator failed despite being tested last week]

The sudden loss of power to the servers in the ITS machine room impacted most University IT facilities and caused both physical and data corruption damage. IT Services were alerted to the situation at 6:15am by Security and initiated their Major Incident procedure. By soon after 7:00am it had been established that while many servers were operating, there were substantial failures. The network had been affected but was in process of recovery.

Sounds remarkably familiar, no? Indeed – a very similar thing happened earlier this year.

5 days later and email is not fully restored. I know that the problems with Groupwise were one of the reasons for moving to Exchange, but still – 5 days without being able to recover these servers is a new record, methinks.