The University’s network and phone systems experienced unrelated technical difficulties on April 18 and then again this past weekend.

Thursday’s problems were caused by a flood in Kennedy Hall. Richard Wack of the User Support division of the Office for University Information Technologies sent an e-mail explaining the situation to students, faculty and staff on April 19.

It read, “The campus experienced a complete interruption in network service between 3:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. Phone service also experienced full and partial interruptions.”

Wack’s e-mail also stated, “The unscheduled outage was necessitated due to a burst pipe in a heat exchange unit which produced flooding in the Kennedy Hall telecommunications room. To protect the network and telecommunication equipment from potential damage, the equipment was powered off immediately…. The network was completely restored by 8:15 p.m.”

Students suffered as a result of the network shutdown. “I was angry because I couldn’t check my e-mail,” said sophomore Ryan McMaster.

Sophomore Chris Fleming also expressed his frustration saying, “I was expecting an important e-mail and I could not access it due to the outage.”

The phone system disruptions also greatly affected the personal lives of students on campus. “I was cut off in the middle of an important phone conversation with my mother,” said sophomore Kate McNamara.

University faculty and staff were another group inconvenienced by the system failure. College of Nursing office manager Barbara Nolan said, “It was frustrating when I had an assignment to complete. It causes a disruption in workflow, and this has been happening more frequently.”

Falvey Memorial Library experienced many problems as well. Rita McCabe of the library’s circulation department said, “Since the Internet and phone systems were down, it interrupted purchase orders of books for the library.”

Students couldn’t log onto the library web page; therefore, they couldn’t access VuCat and other library Internet resources during the network failure.

Telecommunications staff member Ann McCabe said, “The problem of the burst pipe is being handled by Facilities Management. They are still in the process of fixing it.”

In an unrelated incident, University students could not receive phone calls from off campus this past weekend. On-campus communications did not appear to have any problems. Ann McCabe indicated, “The problems were related to Villanova’s off-campus communications vendor, not Villanova’a phone system itself.” She went on to stress that the events were completely unrelated. The problem was fixed over the weekend, and students have not reported any problems receiving off-campus phone calls since.