The University of Exeter took the unusual step of temporarily taking its network down this week in response to a virulent virus outbreak.

Computers at the south west England university were taken offline on Monday for a clean-up in response to an unidentified malware outbreak, which has since been contained.

By Thursday the vast majority of the network was back up and running, according to the Uni’s lastest status update. Exeter is the seat of learning for 15,000 students with three campuses, two in Exeter and a smaller facility in Cornwall.

David Allen, registrar and deputy chief executive of the university, told students and lecturers that taking the campus network offline was a necessary step in fighting the infection, which came in through “PCs running Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 2″.

“Experience of dealing with data corrupting viruses elsewhere indicates that it is essential to shut down the network ASAP to avoid so many machines and files being corrupted that it takes weeks to recover,” Allen explained. “Therefore, although this is a PC rather than a network problem, we had to shut down the network to isolate the virus.”

Exeter is yet to respond to our query on what strain of malware was involved in the attack.

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