White House e-mail down for a day

Updated at 3 p.m. PST with quotes from White House spokesman Bill Burton.

The Obama administration may be considered tech-savvy, but that didn't do much good Monday when the White House was hit with a daylong "server outage."

Most White House aides, the first lady's office, and other executive offices were without e-mail for the day, The Washington Post reported, after the outage blocked all incoming and outgoing messages beginning around 10 a.m. EST.

As of Tuesday morning, the White House was once again sending its regular slew of e-mails.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged the outage during a briefing to reporters Monday afternoon. White House aides at the briefing had to pass out photocopies of the executive orders signed by the president that day, rather than e-mailing them to reporters. The outage, however, did not appear to cause any major disruptions at the White House.

White House spokesman Bill Burton said the outage was the result of a piece of old hardware in the data center breaking Monday morning.

"This caused a chain reaction with other systems, specifically the e-mail servers," he said. "We began the process of modernizing all of our technology infrastructure last week, and the faulty piece of hardware that broke has been replaced."

"In spite of it all, we enjoyed the opportunity to get out from behind our computers and meet with colleagues and visitors face to face," he added.

[karpenterskids]

Did the Bush administration ever have "server outages"?

[us0r]

no they just deleted them.

[ebrandel]

@us0r
The Bush admin deleted server outages?

[scdecade]

Nitwits. It takes them half a day to get an email server back up... They should outsource to someone competent.

[wolivere]

Where did it say the server?

[iamarcin]

the internet is for porn not email.
It took them half a day to realize it was out the other half to find the reset button.

[Michichael]

Wouldn't surprise me if they were making security upgrades and forgot to use a test environment.

[kojacked]

They probably shut it down on purpose once they found that Bush's auto-delete everything daemon was still running.

[rcrusoe]

Bush didn't need an auto-delete daemon. The White House switched from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange in 2002.

IMO, the only reason to do that was so everyone would believe them when they said, "The server lost our emails". :)

[bsharkey]

they blamed it on an old piece of hardware, though we have no idea of knowing the real truth. it seems a stretch to call it software related, let alone Bush-related.

as opposed to the Clinton staff removing the "W" from every keyboard or piece of equipment before leaving, which is actually a documented fact. cute

[johnfranks1234]

Outages, data breaches, and ineffective "solutions" are on the rise. Price Waterhouse Cooper and Carnegie-Mellon?s CyLab have recent surveys that show the senior executive class to be lacking in understanding regarding IT risk and its tie to overall enterprise (business) risk - and the White House will be no exception, as evidenced here. Data breaches and outages are due to a lagging business culture ? and people aren?t getting the training they need. For example: Microsoft patched for the worm affecting Heartland (and credit card processing) 4 months ago. As CIO, I seek things that work, in hopes that good ideas make their way back to me - check your local library: A book that is required reading is "I.T. WARS: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium."
The author, David Scott, has an interview that is a great exposure: http://businessforum.com/DScott_02.html -
The book came to us as a tip from an intern who attended a course at University of Wisconsin, where the book is an MBA text. It has helped us to understand that, while various systems of security are important, no system can overcome laxity, ignorance, or deliberate intent to harm. Necessary is a sustained culture and awareness; an efficient prism through which every activity is viewed from a security perspective prior to action.
In the realm of risk, unmanaged possibilities become probabilities ? read the book BEFORE you suffer a bad outcome ? or propagate one.

[bsharkey]

good point

[n3td3v]

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