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.
Stephanie Condon is a staff writer for CNET News focused on the intersection of technology and politics. She is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail Stephanie. 
The Bush admin deleted server outages?
It took them half a day to realize it was out the other half to find the reset button.
IMO, the only reason to do that was so everyone would believe them when they said, "The server lost our emails". :)
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
The author, David Scott, has an interview that is a great exposure: http://businessforum.com/DScott_02.html -
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In the realm of risk, unmanaged possibilities become probabilities ? read the book BEFORE you suffer a bad outcome ? or propagate one.
- by n3td3v January 27, 2009 2:56 PM PST
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