DeKALB | NIU students working in campus computer labs experienced an inconvenience Monday when users were shut out from 11:30 a.m. until late afternoon.

As of press time, ITS said they did not know what caused the shutdown.

The shutdown affected all computer labs on campus, including the Foreign Language Learning Center and labs in the residence halls.

Students who were logged on with their Z-ID at the time of the shutdown were able to continue working on the computers, but those who tried to log on during the outage could not.

“I have homework,” said sophomore communication major Kara Lemar. “It happens and I understand that; I’m not going to give them a hard time.”

Lemar also said she hoped the outage would end while she still had time to finish some homework between her classes.

Elizabeth Leake, associate director of Information Technology Services, said three of four servers were affected, so some students in certain places could still log on using their Z-ID.

“This has only occurred a couple of times before,” Leake said. “It doesn’t happen very frequently.”

Some students said they thought the interruption was annoying but not a big issue.

“I was just going to check anything I can,” said junior history major Scott Fink. “I wanted to check the Northern Web site and chicagowhitesox.com.”