AUBURN — A Monday power glitch set off a series of problems kept the city from getting email for Wednesday and part of Thursday morning.

Auburn Information Technologies Director Paul Fraser said email service to Auburn Hall and Auburn City Staff was down from about 11 a.m. Wednesday to 6 a.m. Thursday.

“It’s quite a relief to have everything back up again,” Fraser said.

The culprit was a power outage on Monday that lasted longer than the city’s backup power supply.

“We were kind of on-and-off most of Monday, but it got more erratic as the week wore on,” he said. 

Eventually, the city’s Microsoft Exchange email server crashed, corrupting the email database.

“It didn’t get the opportunity to shut down properly, the way we like it,” he said. “The database got corrupted, and it’s a very large file. It had to be rebuilt, which isn’t a problem — just a very slow process.”

Fraser said he doesn’t think the city lost any emails, including those emailed while the server was down. Most emails collected in the city’s email spam filter and were sent on once the server recovered.

“Our spam filter acted a queue, trying to deliver the messages,” he said. “So this morning, we’ve started receiving messages that were sent yesterday. I think everything was safe.”

staylor@sunjournal.com