Posted 8 p.m., Dec. 8: Information System Services officials are attempting to repair a software issue which brought down GW e-mail service around 1:30 p.m. Monday.

Sun Microsystems officials are also on site “systematically” going through the system in order to restore e-mail service, said Bob Ludwig, interim director of media relations.

“Basically it’s a software issue…everytime they get it up for about 30 minutes it goes down again,” Ludwig said. He added that it is the first time GW engineers have dealt with the outages.

While Ludwig could not say how major the software issue was, he said the engineers are “confident” they can fix the problem as soon as possible.

No ISS officials were available for comment Monday evening.

Updates are available at the ISS Web site helpdesk.gwu.edu.

The system went down unexpectedly for about five hours last Tuesday after a software glitch. Ron Bonig, of ISS, said last week that software failures are relatively normal and can be caused by large e-mail messages.

Check www.GWHATCHET.com for further updates.