Last June, a University of Wisconsin internet outage affected all online services for a period of 13 hours. Eight months and $360,000 later, officials are still not sure what caused the failure or who will be paying for it.

Brian Rust, spokesperson at Division of Information Technology, said a power outage brought on by a thunderstorm affected a data center on Dayton Street in June 2014. A backup system with its own dedicated battery power supply known as a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), which normally allows for a safe system shutdown, also failed.

“Several of the batteries exploded, and the backup system failed completely,” Rust said.

The UPS was successful in countering a power surge that accompanied the outage and there was no data loss or server damage, Rust said. The center hosts 100 different services related to the UW System.

The Dayton center is the larger of two such facilities which host UW servers. The other facility functions as a backup and is housed inside the WARF building. According to Rust, the power outage caused the systems — which are designed to trigger the backup — to not work.

The $360,000 price tag is for the complete replacement of the UPS and does not include the staff hours required to bring the system back online following the outage. Rust said he has been assured by the new UPS supplier that the replacement will not suffer from the same defects as the previous one, which had been in operation for 20 years.

There is no word yet as to who will pay for the replacement as negotiations with the insurance company are ongoing.

Procedures for how to deal with similar outages in the future are also being reviewed within DoIT, Rust said.