Students who tried to check their e-mail or browse their favorite Web sites Saturday might have encountered problems when accessing the University network. For those accessing the Internet in the dormitories or other official University access sites, they were met with error messages while network engineers scrambled for half a day to solve the problem.

Early Saturday morning, the University network came under siege from what is suspected to be a denial of service (DoS) attack, which paralyzed the entire network.

“Virtually nothing on campus was working until early afternoon,” said Michael Corn, director of security services and information privacy for campus information technologies and educations services.

From e-mail accounts to browsing the Internet on the University network, a campus-wide shutdown locked out users from using the full network for the duration of nearly 12 hours while network engineers attempted to isolate and fix the problem.

“The problem started around 2 a.m. on Saturday,” said Corn. “It was campus wide. It was the core of the network.”

According to the CITES status of services Web site, network engineers at CITES brought portions of the University network up and online at 12:24 p.m., and a majority of the network came back at 1:36 p.m. By 3 p.m., the CITES engineers brought the network fully up to a normal operation.

Today, CITES will be analyzing the outage to possibly eliminate future attacks and issues associated with Saturday’s network downtime, said Corn.