News
A crash that affects th The e-mail crash, which has been going on since September 18, has resulted in lot of irritation and anxiety. Now most people have got their email back, but their mailboxes are still empty and their contacts are gone. The GU Journal has spoken to a number of concerned employees. Text: Allan Eriksson & Eva Lundgren Photo: Johan Wingborg
MARIA SJÖBERG, Professor of
History, is also concerned that the incident might affect her research. – I am working with the Swedish women’s biographical dictionary with more than 400 participating authors. We only communicate via email, so for us it is very serious when it does not work. Now, using a colleague’s email, we were able to inform the people who had previously contributed to the project about what happened. But we do not know anything regarding any new authors who might have tried to contact us. I also work with colleagues in Canada and they wondered how an incident like this could even be possible.
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GUJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020
ALEXANDRA WEILENMANN, Professor of Interaction Design, believes that the most serious consequences to research will only become apparent in the long run. – Personally, the incident has resulted in delays in, above all, a project where we were just about to start a survey study. On the very day the email stopped working, I had presented the project to external stakeholders and asked them to contact me regarding collaboration. Now I do not even know if anyone tried to contact me or if anyone received cryptic error messages and maybe gave up. It worries me that I might appear slapdash and unprofessional.
ANN-MARIE EKENGREN, Head of the Department of Political Science, points out that it is mainly external communication that has been affected. – We got started pretty quickly with Teams, which the University of Gothenburg’s information page explained we should use. But when it comes to external parties, I am not sure if there are any good alternatives, so what do you do? External communication is particularly difficult when the email system fails in a situation where the majority of people in the research world are working from home.
STAFFAN I. LINDBERG,
Professor of Political Science. Research is going to be particularly hard hit – It is a disaster and completely unacceptable from a operational point of view. I’ve never even heard of anything like this at any university.
