Grades went unchecked. Assignments went uncompleted. PowerPoint notes went un-reviewed.

On Thursday afternoon, eLearning Commons became inaccessible to University students and faculty.

According to Greg Ashley, technology officer for Enterprise Information Technology Services, problems with the program began in October, but EITS professionals were able to restart the system and get eLC back online.

The program experienced problems throughout last week, and on Thursday, the site crashed and was offline until early Sunday morning.

Ashley said the failure was caused by a problem in eLC’s file system.

“It’s a pretty complex issue, and it took some time to diagnose it,” he said. “We ultimately replaced that file system with another file system over the weekend and restored data back to that new file system.”

Ashley said he can’t remember an outage of the previous program, WebCT, or eLC that lasted as long as the recent eLC failure.

“When we architect these systems, we know how extremely critical they are to the mission of the University,” he said. “Historically, WebCT and then eLC have been up over 99.9 percent of the time, so we’ve had very few issues or failures around the systems.”

Ashley said the problem was not preventable, but he is confident the new file system will prevent similar problems from occurring in the near future.

“We’re confident that we’ve fixed that issue,” he said. “Moving forward, we’re always looking for ways to strengthen our systems and increase their availability.”

Paula Lemons, an assistant professor of biology, said the eLC outage caused her to postpone a test for her introductory biology class that was originally scheduled for last Thursday.

When eLC was experiencing sporadic outages last week, Lemons said her students were unable to access the materials needed to study for the test.

“I had uploaded all my lecture outlines and clicker questions and feedback that I give to students about work they turned into eLC — and all that is pertinent to their studying,” she said.

Lemons said the outage affected the lecture schedule for her class. She did not have enough time to develop a lecture for Thursday in place of the test, so the lecture she gives on the final day of class, which is usually a review of all the material covered over the course of the semester, will be cut.

Some students said the crash wasn’t a problem for them.

John Daubenmire, a freshman from Watkinsville, said the eLC shortages didn’t cause a major inconvenience for him.

“I mean if I had four classes that all relied on eLC, then I could see how that could be a problem,” Daubenmire said. “But since I only have one that really uses eLC, it wasn’t really that big of a deal.”

Michelle Cheng, a senior from Dunwoody, however, had a test last Thursday in her chocolate chemistry class, and said she was affected by the eLC shortages that occurred on Wednesday.

“It was really frustrating not to be able to access eLC on Wednesday,” she said. “I couldn’t access it until late at night — maybe nine or 10. Almost all the notes were there, and it was just really frustrating that I couldn’t get on.”

Despite the shortages, Cheng’s chocolate chemistry test was still held on Thursday. She said the fact that she could not access eLC on Wednesday could have affected her performance on the test, but she doesn’t know for sure.

“I’m just glad it’s back,” she said.