Posted: Dec. 9, 7:30 p.m. — Technology officials are monitoring GW’s e-mail system after more than a day of sporadic service.

An initial outage occurred Monday at about 1:30 p.m., but service was brought up at about midnight. Colonial Mail was unavailable intermittently throughout the day Tuesday and became stable during late afternoon.

A software problem with an e-mail server caused the outage, said Johnny Bret Jones, director of Technology Engineering. He said engineers worked “around the clock” to fix the problem.

“My big question is the (e-mail system) has been running pretty flawlessly for four to five months – why (Monday) afternoon?” Jones said.

GW replaced the previously used Webmail with Colonial Mail this summer. Jones said feedback has been mostly positive concerning Colonial Mail and it more stable.

Jones said software problems are tough to anticipate because there are “millions and millions of lines of code and all of them have bugs in them.”

Because of the software problem, the e-mail system is not running in its full mode. He said technicians will re-implement the affected piece after or during winter break.

“My primary objective is a stable e-mail system,” Jones said.