A hardware problem caused periodic trouble for students, faculty and staff trying to access their Binghamton University e-mail accounts last Thursday through Saturday.

“Whenever something like electronic mail goes down, there are people who are seriously inconvenienced,” said Jim Wolf, the director of academic computing services. “We know within 10 seconds when we have problems with e-mail.”

The problem began Thursday morning and continued until that evening, when service was temporarily brought back up. The e-mail system crashed again around noon on Friday and was corrected and back in use by 1:30 p.m. the next day.

“It’s very, very rare that we have problems that last as long as those,” Wolf said.

The problem was ultimately attributed to a malfunction of a hard drive component. According to Wolf, the system is under a hardware maintenance agreement with the supplier, Sun Microsystems, and cost the University nothing to repair.

“You try to have things redundant, but sometimes, if the wrong piece fails, you’re in real trouble,” Wolf said.

According to Wolf, anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 messages make it to Binghamton mail servers each day. Some of these are blocked, some are tagged as suspicious, and the remaining 20-25 percent make it through as “received.”

“It’s just fortunate that it didn’t happen the week before finals,” Wolf said.