Northwestern’s Hecky e-mail server shut down Thursday for a little more than an hour, leaving most sophomores and some faculty and staff members temporarily without e-mail access.

The failure came from a faulty network interface card in the Hecky server computer, said Tom Board, director of Technology Support Services for. The card failed at about 12:30 p.m. and NU Information Technology replaced it at about 1:50 p.m.

“These things spontaneously fail,” said Board. “It was probably old.”

The Hecky server computer uses a Hewlett-Packard network interface card. Without the card, the Hecky server could not communicate with the personal computers belonging to students, faculty and staff, and computers on the server could not receive or send e-mail.

Weinberg Sophomore Zoe Mentel tried to check her e-mail at 1:20 p.m. but quickly realized something was wrong. “I was annoyed for a millisecond,” Mentel said “But then I got over it. I checked it about two hours later and it was fine.”

The status of all university servers can be monitored at the NUIT server status page, http://status.northwestern.edu. If a server is unavailable, its name will appear in red on the left side of the page. Students can also call the NUIT help line at (847) 491-HELP.