A string of problems affecting the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) computer network has denied network access to students across Harvard and intermittently prevented them from checking e-mail since last Saturday.

Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98, said that the trouble seemed more serious because the three separate incidences occurred in quick succession.

“I think we have seen a little bit of a coincidence,” Davis said. “Because we have had all three of these events in such short order it has appeared to be a much bigger problem.”

According to a summary of service outages on the FAS Computer Services website, the first of the problems occurred at 11:00 p.m. last Saturday, causing a network service interruption throughout the River Houses until 5:00 a.m. the following morning.

Davis, who is also a Crimson editor, said that computer service employees were actually testing new software designed by Cisco Systems specifically designed to fix a bug during the time of the outage.

Davis said that as part of the repair process, the new updates were installed, which should prevent the problem from occurring in the future.

“Last week we were running tests, but the bug came to fruition before we could put the patch out there,” Davis said.

The second network outage came just 15 hours later at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday night.

In what Davis referred to as a “freak occurrence,” a one-second power outage at a Boston power station caused the network instability.

Davis said that the outage was just long enough to cause several machines to shut down. The return of electricity caused a power surge, interfering with network computers, but normal service was restored soon thereafter.

The third widespread disruption came early yesterday morning. At 12:05 a.m., Unix, web, and e-mail services were cut off as a result of a server error.

Davis said that there was a mechanical glitch in a disk that helps to run the server. He said that engineers came in shortly after and fixed the problem.

“Nothing at this time suggests anything more than a standard, routine hard-drive failure,” Davis said.

Although the problem was fixed by 1:30 a.m., several students found the lack of Internet access to be an inconvenience.

Susan D. Cooley ’06 said that the problem delayed her studying for a listening quiz in Literature and Arts B-63, “Bach in His Time and through the Centuries.”