The e-mail crasch

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.

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.

A crash that affects the whole University

SUSANNE DODILLET, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education and Special Education, thinks that the loss of addresses is a bigger disaster than the email crash itself. – At the same time as I got my email back, my entire private address book disappeared from my private mobile phone. That was because I registered my University of Gothenburg address in the phone’s email app. I thought that was secure.

MARIA SUNNERSTAM, Deputy Head of the PIL unit, got her email back after two weeks. – But it is behaving strangely. Some emails I sent remain in the outbox, it seems as if they are not being sent. I also usually archive my emails in different folders and because I made a backup before the crash, I have got some of my emails back. But most of it is gone.

JOHAN MAGNUSSON,

Director of the Swedish Centre for Digital Innovation, is one of several employees who is critical of the handling of the email crash. – When this happens, clear communication is necessary regarding what has happened, how it will be solved and what will be set up in the future. It is the university’s management that should assume this responsibility, not IT, and it has not been done. The email system crashed while a modernization was underway. – Now there is a risk that employees will lose confidence in the technology and create their own solutions instead, which potentially might lead to an enormous growth of shadow IT. Such a nightmare must be actively opposed by the university’s management. The only way is through clear communication.

GÜNTHER DIPPE, IT Manager at the National Centre for Mathematics Education (NCM), believes that the incident has created both anxiety and anger among employees. – It did not get any better when the IT manager released a statement to Göteborgs-Posten where he talked about alternative communication routes which made the University of Gothenburg’s employees hit the roof. The university’s management also handled the crash badly from the start, that is, they did not handle it at all. Perhaps they were not informed how serious the situation was? As far as I know, I have not been affected too badly by the incident. But NCM has several projects that are in critical stages where email communication is absolutely crucial. The incident has obviously caused serious delays and a lot of extra work, as we cannot communicate in the way we normally do. Now that we have finally started to get our mailboxes back, we still do not have access to our old emails. This is another very serious problem that needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

SARA THOMÉE, Researcher at the Department of Psychology, believes that the email crash demonstrates the need to be prepared for unexpected situations. – There should be procedures for how to respond when something happens, so that we know to always go to the internal website to get information and that everyone is aware of the alternative communication channels. In other sectors, there are regular staff meetings that everyone attends, but universities are different. People are more spread out and the information does not always reach them, especially not now when most people are working from home. However, crises usually shake things up: just think of how the pandemic has made us learn how to use the digital platforms which we have actually had access to for a long time. Can you imagine what would happen if the entire internet suddenly died. Despite everything, people seem to carry on working anyway, you find other ways of communicating and that is positive.