The University of Oregon Technology services has confirmed that Webmail services are up and running again after an outage earlier today.

The university’s email service was down this morning from approximately 4 a.m. until 11:15 a.m.

Wireless also was down this morning, but became available again at 11:06 a.m.

“It is difficult to give a precise time for Webmail because there are a lot of computers that run behind the scenes,” Patrick Chinn, director of strategic communication for information services said.

To put it simply, each server is made up of multiple certificates, which verify that emails should send and receive data back and forth. These certificates often last upward of 10 to 20 years. This morning, a certificate that was issued 20 years ago expired.

“There is a system that should pick up the expiration of certificates, but for some reason it did not pick it up this morning,” Chinn said.

Teams at the University of Oregon Information Technology services have been working on the problem all morning.

“We have a set of staff that are on call over night and we mobilized those staff,” Chinn said. “We have a Tuesday morning maintenance window between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. and that was when the problem was first noticed.”

According to Chinn, IT began receiving phone calls when most students, faculty and staff first became aware around 6:30 a.m.

“Our tech desk had a lot of phone calls this morning,” Chinn said. “In a situation like this when email is down, people often want to know what is going on, but we are unable to send out emails to them to let them know.”

Instead, IT updates their status website and encourages UO students and faculty to use this tool when they have questions.

“Our status website also had a lot of traffic this morning,” Chinn stated. “We use the status website to let people know that there were issues and it’s not a problem on their end.”