On Sunday, students, professors, and other members of the University community experienced difficulty accessing their UChicago Outlook accounts.

For most of the day, the University’s IT status page said that Outlook services were experiencing “major disruptions.” A notice on the page said that problems began at around 10:30 a.m. and that users who tried to send emails to affected accounts were receiving error messages.

In an email sent to affected users on Sunday, Kemal Badur, the University’s chief technology officer, described a “synchronization problem… that inadvertently caused many email users to lose access to their mailbox and removed the forwarding configuration for some users.”

Badur emphasized that the access issue would be fixed by Sunday evening, but email forwarding may continue to see issues. He also recommended that users check their web mailboxes at https://outlook.office365.com/mail. Some users continued to report problems with their email despite the IT status page’s indication that the issues were resolved.

In another email sent on Tuesday, Kevin Boyd, the University’s chief information officer, apologized for the interruption and expressed a commitment to “taking steps to minimize this situation from happening again in the future.” He also advised students continuing to experience issues to contact IT Services Support.