Defense networks go down for three hours, technical problems cited

Networks serving Defense Department personnel in the Washington metro area and the Midwest experienced a three-hour outage Thursday morning due to unspecified "technical issues" at three gateways that connect military networks to commercial Internet access points, a spokeswoman for the Defense Information Systems Agency said.

The outage, which was not caused by malicious activity, according to the spokeswoman, caused some Defense personnel to experience degraded service, such as the inability to connect to the commercial Internet.

DISA worked with its vendors to reroute critical traffic until the technical issues with the gateways were resolved, the spokeswoman said.