For around four hours starting at 3:30 p.m. yesterday, Binghamton University’s campus was without Internet, telephone service and Bmail.

The network and the phone service, which is based on Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP), went down after a fiber-optic cable that runs from Johnson City to Syracuse was severed, according to Adam Heimowitz, a help desk consultant at Binghamton University’s Information Technology Services and a sophomore majoring in political science.

Before service was restored at around 8:20 p.m., ITS was not sure how long it would take to repair the issue.

“It will most likely be remedied within 24 hours,” Heimowitz told Pipe Dream, during the outage. “However, since we don’t know the details, we don’t have an exact time estimate.”

While the Internet was down, students on campus panicked.

“Today was incredibly stressful,” said Kate Keenly, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering. “I was in the PODS working on a lab report that was due at 5 p.m. and the Internet just stopped and everyone just started freaking out. I literally had to get in my friend’s car and rush to [University Plaza], and got it in just in time.”

Jen Hertz, a sophomore majoring in accounting, said that many students in Newing College’s Broome Hall were upset.

“People were pissed and thought it was ridiculous that the Internet was not working for so long,” she said. “The kids that had the Calc III test tonight were in tears and desperately trying to find Internet access.”

During the outage, Bmail was inaccessible from any device, including phones and computers.

“They used Binghamton servers to route the service to Google, hence why Bmail is down,” Heimowitz said.

Other sites like Blackboard and BU Brain were still accessible through 3G or off-campus connections because the University rerouted the sites.

“Usually, we host them, but they changed them today so that people would be able to still use sites,” Heimowitz said. “Blackboard is working, which is surprising because it never works.”

Three messages were sent from the University’s alert system at 4:52 p.m., 5:02 p.m and 8:51 p.m.

The first message informed students that the network was down and that restoration time was unknown. The second text stated that if students had an emergency, they should dial 911 from a cell phone and that all non-emergency phone calls should be directed to BU Police at (607) 698-0227. The third informed students that the Internet was again available on campus.

The PODS in the Glenn G. Bartle Library were empty for most of the afternoon.

Alex Jaffe, a senior majoring in human development, walked into the empty computer room thinking he had gotten lucky, only to have his hopes dashed.

“I was really excited because all of the computers were opened, and then I realized there was a reason for that,” Jaffe said.