Students on campus for spring break could not swipe into their residential colleges or other campus facilities throughout Wednesday after Yale’s keycard system malfunctioned.

Afters several hours without any official notice, the University circulated an email at 5 p.m. notifying students and staff of the problem. The email instructed students to call Yale Security if they were unable to unlock doors or gates. Although the problem now appears to have been resolved, the University is still trying to determine the cause of the keycard issue, University spokesman Tom Conroy said.

“We believe that the sporadic issues with some individuals’ card access that occurred yesterday have ended,” Conroy said. “But Yale is monitoring the situation closely and working to determine what caused the problem.”

Students spending spring break at Yale said the malfunction was confusing and inconvenient.

“It is annoying because on one hand I feel like I shouldn’t leave my dorm until they fix it, because I’ll have to call in any time I want to swipe in anywhere,” said Rebecca Goldberg ’21, a production and design staffer for the News. “But on the other, it’s clear that they’re working on it, so I can’t blame facilities for the issue,”

Goldberg said she noticed her keycard was not working at around 1 p.m. Wednesday, when she tried to access the gym in Morse College. Initially, she said, she assumed administrators had temporarily locked Morse’s gates, but recognized an issue with the entire system when she could not access her entryway on Old Campus. After she contacted Yale Security, she said, officials unlocked the gate without a problem.

Victoria Chen ’21 said the card-access problem must have been a burden on Yale’s security officers, since students had to call for assistance each time they needed to enter an area with a locked gate or door.

“It’s quite a nuisance,” Chen said. “You don’t really realize how much you swipe normally, to get into colleges, entryways, the buttery.”

Yale started transitioning from mechanical keys to keycards in 1994.