"We've had our fair share of isolated issues, but it's been a long time since we've had something this widespread and this permanent," said Rick Osterberg '96, a database applications specialist for HASCS.

Osterberg did not rule out the possibility of an attack on the FAS network, but said he thought the length of time that the network was down indicated something more fundamental was wrong.

"This sounds like a Cisco router issue, either software or hardware gone haywire," he said.

Davis said HASCS engineers would be working on the problem throughout the night--and perhaps into today--until the network was up and running again.

"We realize that our services need to be available 24 hours a day, so when something goes down we're here until it gets fixed," he said.

Davis said HASCS's immediate priority would be to get the network up and running again, and finding out what went wrong would come later.

"At this point, the focus is not on finding out why things failed," he said. "Right now, the most important thing is to get systems up and running."