A suspicious powdery substance was found this morning on the eighth floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. The Capitol Police’s Hazardous Devices Unit was dispatched to the scene around 10:45 a.m. and determined the substance to be harmless.

“It cleared. It’s negative,” said Sgt. Contricia Sellers-Ford, spokeswoman for the Capitol Police.

Meanwhile, the Senate’s computer servers lost power Tuesday morning due to an outage at Postal Square, where the machines are housed.

According to the Senate’s internal Web site, Webster, power was restored at Postal Square around 11:30 a.m. Central computing services were fully restored soon thereafter.

According to a spokeswoman, the “uninterruptable power supply” line, which feeds the servers on the sixth floor of Postal Square, failed.

“This failure affected the network, which controls the interoffice [and external] e-mail, but people could send intraoffice e-mail” during the outage, she said. “The current status is that everything is back up and running. They did that by bypassing this piece of equipment” that failed, she added.