Email Outage Leaves White House Feeling 'Very 1985,' 'Like A Snow Day'

The White House's email server went down early Thursday morning, forcing staffers to reacquaint themselves with oldfangled forms of communication.

According to a tweet by White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, the unclassified email server for the West Wing went down around 8 a.m. on Thursday.

"Verizon is working to solve the problem," Pfeiffer also tweeted.

An aide told Politico that the White House has been feeling "very 1985" following the outage.

"We're actually picking up that old device called the telephone and calling people," the staffer told Politco. "And we're reading documents in paper form." Fax machines were also in use, insiders said.

The Washington Post offered more color around the effect of the downtime:

Senior officials, unable to shoot each other quick emails as they normally do, darted up and down staircases for meetings. Several said they could not print, or access any documents at all -- even files that were not connected to e-mail. The files they could share with reporters were scanned copies of faxes -- again, not normal.

President Obama, who carries a BlackBerry, was cut off from e-mail as well during his trip to State College, Pa. One adviser said it felt "like a snow day," with no one getting much done.

According to the Washington Post, the Office of Management and Budget in the nearby Eisenhower Executive Office Building were also experiencing an outage. WaPo noted that service was restored "mid-afternoon" Thursday.

The White House suffered a similar email outage in 2009.

Comments

[SageSpencer]

04:18 AM on 02/06/2011

I actually think it is a good thing and companies should have unplugged days. Tech is wonderful. I love tech. I would try everything in beta; that is how much I love tech but tech can make us stupid. We should be trying out back up systems. Companies and all of us should be functioning without tech once in a while, so we know how to if we need to (important in a crisis) and to see the effects, so we understand what we are gaining, loosing and failing to notice while being so connected. IMHO.

[GrainOfSand]

01:29 PM on 02/05/2011

Why didn't they have a back up system? And why are they doing business with Verizon? Aren't they a conservative backed company?

[crayola 08b]

01:19 PM on 02/04/2011

well i hope they did the appropriate thing and blasted some Tears for Fears on the boom box.

Shout! Shout! Let it all out!...

[xargaw]

12:29 PM on 02/04/2011

Shouldn't this be a lesson that perhaps we are too dependent on ONE type of communication. If we had a cyber attack, we should have viable alternatives that would not cripple us. This is an opportunity for some smart techno types to development a second competing and compatible communication system.

[lowery2008]

05:21 PM on 02/04/2011

We are too dependent on technology in general not just one type communication. Can you live without your computer for a week?

[AgingLady]

11:19 AM on 02/04/2011

Made me laugh. Definitely a leveling event, we are all in the same tech boat.

[ThinkTwiceWriteOnce]

10:54 AM on 02/04/2011

Oh the humanity!!!!!!!!

[zanzy]

09:09 AM on 02/04/2011

It is because so many Americans are calling (via e-mail) on the US government (Obama, Congress and State Department) to intervene on the side of the Egyptian people and support their democratic movement.

Congratulations to all Americans, we have change the course of our policy towards the Egyptian People! May they be free! May we have massive social and economic reform here at home and throughout the world! We really have enormous power, let's use it for good for a change!

[JasonMcl]

08:57 AM on 02/04/2011

"Verizon is working to solve the problem,"

Did anyone else burst out laughing when they read this?

[troyrobertdavid]

09:59 AM on 02/04/2011

Yes

[GrainOfSand]

01:30 PM on 02/05/2011

Verizon? The White House is using THAT company? No wonder it failed.

[GardenerNorCal]

08:53 AM on 02/04/2011

Says a lot for the level of security doesn't it.

[artist-53]

09:29 AM on 02/04/2011

How so?

Has your internet service ever gone down on you?

If so, did you call your internet service provider first or NSA?

[newtom]

10:04 AM on 02/04/2011

It was the "unclassified email server" according to the article so... what does that have to do with security?

[insider9909]

08:52 AM on 02/04/2011

This, again, emphasizes the danger of being totally committed to "cloud" computing, which means that you are using a totally web-based off-site server. If your ISP goes down, or your broad band connection fails, you immediatley go lights out with little or no IT capabilitiy. I may be old school, but I believer running your own email server attached to your LAN/WAN is a more reliable solution. At least you will have internal communications capability and work efforts can continue until your external link comes back online.

[SeanMMasters]

09:59 AM on 02/04/2011

The best practice response to that risk is to get two data lines, each from a different ISP, running over different physical lines, switches, trunks, etc.

That the seat of power for the USA doesn't have proper risk mitigation like that in play is astounding.

[lj9283]

09:53 AM on 02/05/2011

I would think that an unclassified email server would not be located at the White House, but at an "Off - Site" sever farm, as I can imagine real estate in the White House would be much better used that to house a mail server to feed the press.

Verizon probably has the maintenance contract on the server in whatever Data Center it is located.

If it were a "mission critical server" it would have been mirred in the event of a hardware crash.

[Beelzabubba]

08:38 AM on 02/04/2011

Wait till P0TUS gets the internet kill switch...

[arcanepsyche]

09:28 PM on 02/05/2011

Read the news more, that's already not happening.

[susiesiouxsie]

08:14 AM on 02/04/2011

OMG! what will they do?! Tragic!

[Deaninphilly]

07:31 AM on 02/04/2011

Oh the horror you mean they actually had to pick up the phone and ......... speak to someone. I hope they brought in counselors for the trauma.

They had to walk to talk to someone, if you had internet ever hear of instant messaging? Perhaps some more outages is exactly what we need more of, then people would actually have to use their social skills again

[padrushka]

04:09 AM on 02/04/2011

Good to know the wh loses service.

[Dave Harpe]

02:32 AM on 02/04/2011

Testing the kill switch?