There were several electrical outages in Oxford earlier today that affected both the St Giles building and Dartington House. The electrical problems began about 5:48am and lasted until about 8:20. Southern Electric say two faults on their high voltage network caused the problems. Reports of an explosion in central Oxford this morning was actually the sound caused by large fuses breaking during a fire at an electricity sub station on Parks Road which further affected power to university buildings.
Although the departmental IT services largely weathered the electrical problems, the outages took out part of the university backbone network and hence left the departmental network inaccessible from outside the department (and also partially unusable within the department due to the backbone network outage preventing connection between buildings) until about 10am when power was restored to the failed section of the university backbone.
A network switch serving the 3rd floor of the St Giles building suffered an unrecoverable fault during the outages. It was replaced at 14:00 restoring service.
If you find problems with a desktop machine that are not resolved by rebooting it/turning it off and on again, or have problems with any other maths IT services please report the issue to @email as normal.