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University of Wisconsin Internet Outage Cost $360,000

During the outage, websites hosted on wisc.edu went dark and email addresses that end in wisc.edu — about 80,000 students and employees have one — stopped working.

(TNS) -- Replacing a power system destroyed last June at UW-Madison — which darkened the university’s website and disabled nearly all electronic communication for a day — cost $360,000, said a spokesman with the school’s Division of Information Technology, or DoIT.

Spokesman Brian Rust said it’s still unknown who will be on the hook to replace the uninterruptible power supply, a roomful of batteries that power a data center on Dayton Street.

“The ‘who pays’ question is still in negotiation with the insurance company,” Rust said. John Krogman, who directs DoIT, told the State Journal last September that he was “cautiously optimistic” the insurer would pay.

The outage occurred on a Wednesday morning in June when the campus was unusually quiet with most students on summer break. It was caused when the power source quit to the uninterruptible power supply. The data center is the largest at the university. Power returned to the data center just after 5 p.m.

Initial reports that tied the outage to a tree falling on a telephone line near a power substation on campus were likely inaccurate, Krogman said. He said the cause, being investigated by the insurer, was likely to include a variety of factors related to severe thunderstorms that swept through the area that morning.

During the outage, websites hosted on wisc.edu, including the university’s homepage, went dark. Email addresses that end in wisc.edu — about 80,000 students and employees have one — stopped working.

©2015 The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wis.)