The power failure also caused the College's email and web servers to go down for an extended period of time, according to Phil Fitz, director of information technology (IT).
"It took down pretty much everything," said Fitz.
A broken cable inside Western Electric Company's Amherst substation blanketed the campus in darkness starting at 2:24 Sunday morning, according to Ken Garber, a community relations representative for the electric company.
The company was able to restore power before 4:00 a.m. to the College and some other customers by bringing power in from an alternate source. The last customers were restored at 4:51 a.m., according to Garber.
"The College is being supplied by that alternate source," said Dan Lewis, an engineer for the company, who indicated that the cable has still not been repaired as of Monday night.
Lewis speculated that "age" was the most likely cause of the rupture. He said that technicians are currently working to restore the connection.
Garber explained that the electricity lines are set up in loops, which allows the company to bring in backup electricity when necessary.
Beyond the lights being out, perhaps the most noticeable effect of the outage was that dorm entrance keypads stopped functioning when the power went out.
As a result, campus police had a substantially increased number of calls to let students into dormitories, Chief of Campus Police John Carter said.
"In an event like that, we pretty much have to wait it out," said Carter, who said that dispatchers called him at home around 2:45 a.m. to inform him of the power outage.
"People's anxiety level rises some when they don't have power," Carter added. He said, however, that there was not any particular increase in safety incidents during the power outage.
"Areas protected by intrusion alarms have battery back-up," added Carter.
Fitz said that email servers were down half the day on Sunday and that the web servers were down until late Sunday night.
"Pretty much everything went down and went down hard," said Fitz.
Fitz said that many of the servers are backed up on an uninterrupted power supply (UPS), which provides several hours worth of electricity. But the outage outlasted all of those energy reserves.
"When a system is not brought down gracefully, it experiences problems with both software and hardware," said Fitz,
Fitz added that the hard disk on the College's web server crashed and would not come back up without repair. "[The outage] created actual hardware problems."
As a result of the failure, IT had to bring in workers on Sunday to clean up the problems, according to Fitz.
Fitz also said that the new webmail systems will allow the email servers to remain on backup power for longer.
Carter said that there were three officers and one dispatcher on-duty at the time of the blackout and that two others came to assist shortly thereafter.
"We actually have a procedure in place for these kind of things," said Carter, who added that they called a number of Physical Plant personnel in preparation for the worst case scenario-that the failure would last indefinitely.
Lewis explained that dorms on the Hill were not affected by the power outage because they are on a separate current circuit.
Adding to the havoc Sunday morning, two fire alarms sounded in Stone Dormitory during the outage. Though fire alarms continue to function properly during a power outage, the first Stone alarm, at 2:52 a.m., had no clear cause, according to Carter, who said that the cause could have been related to the power outage.
Someone pulled a false fire alarm soon after the fire department came to check the dorm, causing the alarm to sound a second time at 3:25 a.m.
Lewis said that an additional 80 customers probably lost power initially but that their power was restored automatically by the system.