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.