White House, Un-Wired: Obama’s Office Suffers E-Mail Outage

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There’s no time quite like a revolution happening on the other side of the world when the e-mail decides to go down. But that’s what happened yesterday at the White House.

It’s not the first time that White House technology has failed — at the beginning of the administration, there were a few incidents where Internet outages occurred, forcing staff to function without technology.

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The Washington Post reports that “…advisers normally glued to their BlackBerries wandered the halls Thursday, suddenly untethered from their desks, talking to one another.” Officials, instead of shooting each other quick e-mails, were forced to run down the halls for meetings. Imagine that.

Even President Obama, while visiting Pennyslvania, was unable to check his BlackBerry. The White House communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, eventually resorted to Twitter to get in touch with everyone.

Fortunately, for world security everywhere, the outage did not actually affect U.S. officials monitoring the Egypt situation. (via Washington Post)

(More on NewsFeed: Read about how Egypt ‘shut off’ the Internet.)