AMHERST — Amherst College’s email system and phone lines have been down for several days this week as part of a network outage.
College spokesman Caroline Hanna said Friday that the college’s Information Technologies team and senior support personnel are working with vendors and outside experts, around the clock, to resolve the problem that began Tuesday.
The cause of the outage has not yet been identified, Hanna said, but the hope is to have email access fully restored in the coming days.
Several alerts have gone out to to the college, and updates have been regularly posted on the college’s Twitter and Facebook feeds.
To allow the college to function, the IT department installed wi-fi hotspots in portions of the campus, including Frost Library, Valentine Hall and the Science Center, as a short-term solution.
Though the college has remained open, Hanna said the outage has created challenges and hardships, both for faculty and students who depend on email for communicating, as well as staff for doing their work.
Hanna notes that her college email account access has been sporadic, and since her voice mail is connected to the email, any messages from the public aren’t being received in a timely fashion.
Hanna said essential college phone numbers and contacts, including the police department and admissions, financial aid and counseling offices, have not been down.
“People have been understanding and patient with it,” Hanna said.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
