Credit: Courtesy of OSU.

Credit: Courtesy of OSU.

An error during a routine maintenance activity left students and professors unable to access Carmen after 4:40 a.m. on Sunday. The website could be down for the next two to four days, according to the Office of the Chief Information Officer website.

The error occurred when a maintenance team encountered an error in how the different parts of the system communicate with each other. The team immediately stopped the task, but found the error forced them to revert to a previous version of Carmen, the website said.

“We are working diligently to minimize the downtime to campus,” the website said. “We deeply regret the impact of this problem on your coursework.”

Katharine Keune, a spokeswoman for the OCIO, said the outage occurred after technicians attempted to add more storage space to the Carmen website and encountered an error in how the different parts of the system communicate with each other.

Keune said the expansion was a routine activity the office has done many times in the past. She said OCIO tries to estimate how much space Carmen will need before the semester begins, but the growth of digital scholarships and distance education courses took up more space than expected.

Carmen is being restored from backup copies, but the error the team encountered Sunday morning affected multiple copies of Carmen’s data, which means the team needs to use a slower method to recover the files, Keune said..

“Right now, our primary concern is restoring Carmen so that the university community is back up and running on this critical resource,” Keune said in an email.

OCIO recommends students and professors communicate about due dates for assignments, the Carmen website said.

Tori Byram, a third-year in geography, said she was directly affected by the Carmen outage. She said she had a paper due Monday morning and got up early Sunday to work on it. The primary source she had to use for the paper was on Carmen, but she couldn’t access it.

“I just got really, really scared when I found out (Carmen was down) because I was like, ‘Oh my God, this paper is due,’” Byram said. “I thought it would be back up within a few hours though. I’m surprised it’s still down.”

Byram said she emailed her professor and her assignment is now due on Friday.

OCIO did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment Sunday night.