Posted: Sat, Mar 3, 2001, 4:59 PM ET (2159 GMT)
The SETI@home project's connection to the Internet was restored Saturday afternoon after an outage of more than four days. The SETI@home servers were cut off early Tuesday morning when vandals severed a fiber that provided voice and data service for the building at the University of California Berkeley where the servers are housed. After several days of work a new fiber was installed and the connection restored early Saturday afternoon. The project has nearly three million users worldwide who download chunks of data collected as part of a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) project, process the data when their computers would normally be idle, and transmit the results back to the Berkeley servers. Project officials caution on the SETI@home web site that it may take up to 48 hours before the data servers can accept all the connections from users eager to start processing data again.

Related Links:

•  SETI@home web site