By Curtis Gibby
Faculty and staff can breathe easy today. Financial Services will have their paychecks ready on time this week.
A disk failure caused several key databases to crash over the weekend. The databases, which included payroll, human resources and CES admissions files, have been restored, said an Office of IT spokesperson.
On Monday afternoon, workers at the Financial Services office were unable to complete their assigned duties, said payroll manager Randy Morgan.
'We just can''t do anything at all - period,' Morgan said Monday.
Payroll clerk Andrea Bush, 19, a sophomore from Pleasant Grove who has not yet declared a major, said the Financial Services staff was preparing paychecks for direct deposit Friday and for printed checks to be given out Aug. 12.
Morgan said if the database hadn''t been available by Tuesday, there might be a possibility of university employees not getting their paychecks on time.
On Tuesday, the Office of IT Web site confirmed that the payroll database was online and Morgan said the paychecks would be completed as normal.
A Route Y service outage related to the same crash caused annoyance among students because they couldn''t access e-mail, AIM and financial aid through the Internet.
Students, faculty and staff were unable to log in to the Route Y system for almost 24 hours between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday afternoon because the system was unexpectedly down, said Max Davis, operations director for the Office of IT.
At the time, the front page of the main BYU Web site called the outage a 'catastrophic failure.'
Davis said the outage happened when the hard drive crashed on the university''s main database server.
Despite the Route Y interface being down, e-mail servers were not affected during the outage, Davis said.
The crash affected students trying to access all Route Y functions.
'I was trying to get in because I wanted a specific class. I obviously didn''t get it,' said April Mortensen, 21, a junior from Sanford, Colo. majoring in therapeutic recreation.
Becky Whitney, a Testing Center employee, said students were also peeved by not being able to access test scores at the Testing Center and on the Internet.
'It was annoying to students because their test scores didn''t pop up on the monitor immediately,' said Whitney, 23, a senior from Glendale, Ariz. majoring in marriage, family human development.
An office of IT spokesperson said technicians and database administrators worked round the clock throughout the weekend to restore affected systems.
The Route Y interface was up and running before Friday.