Provost Linda Katehi issued a mass e-mail to students, faculty and staff following Sunday’s power outage asking for “understanding” of the impact on students’ ability to meet deadlines.

The University’s servers were also knocked out by the outage that cut power to the majority of campus buildings. CITES e-mail, Compass and Mallard were unavailable for most of the day.

The Compass Web site was still closed for maintenance at 11:30 a.m.

“Many students were not able to access online course materials and email throughout the day, and facilities in residence halls also experienced some disruption. Many students who had planned to complete assignments or prepare for exams were unable to do so adequately throughout most of the day on Sunday,” she wrote in the e-mail.

“Although I encourage you to continue to hold our students to the highest of academic standards, I would also ask that you be understanding and accommodating with regard to Sunday’s difficulties,” the e-mail continued.

Katehi also expressed her approval with the University’s emergency communication systems used during Sunday’s outage, including the Illini-Alert text and e-mail system.