Faculty and staff faced problems with their UNC email accounts last week as the transition to an updated system slowed the email service.
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Infrastructure and Operations Dennis Schmidt said ITS was transferring email servers to an updated Microsoft Exchange system when the email degradation occurred. The problems began on Wednesday night and were resolved by Friday morning.
“We had already moved over 20,000 users successfully and the system worked well. This was the last group of 11,000,” Schmidt said. “The migration went smooth, but then the system was having trouble keeping up with the increased load and the email performance degraded significantly.”
To resolve the problem, Schmidt said ITS increased server storage and capacity.
Schmidt said students using Heelmail were not affected by the degradation.
“There are 30,000 accounts on the system, probably a large percentage of those were affected,” Schmidt said. “There were other people who were still operational.”
Kate Hash, manager of ITS communications and digital services, said they became aware of the problems through the system and through reports of problems.
“We had alerts popping up for us and at the same time, we were getting reports from IT folks around campus that there were some email slowness happening,” Hash said.
To inform faculty and staff of the problems, Hash said they used social media and posted updates to the ITS website. She said they also communicated with IT directors across campus.
