White House e-mail service fails

By Alice Lipowicz

| February 3, 2011

The White House's unclassified e-mail system went down early Thursday; the reason was unknown by late Thursday afternoon.

The outage is also affecting the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office Building, the Washington Post reported in an today.

The White House has been struck by another e-mail outage.

The president’s West Wing executive offices’ unclassified e-mail system stopped functioning around 8 a.m. and is currently unavailable, Dan Pfeiffer, a White House spokesman, announced on Twitter today.

“WH unclassified e-mail went down shortly before 8 AM. Verizon working to solve the problem,” Pfeiffer tweeted around noon. He added that pool reports on the incident would be available in the press room later today.

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This is at least the second time the White House has experienced significant e-mail downtime. A mysterious day-long e-mail blackout occurred in January 2009 that was blamed on an unexplained server failure.

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The White House's unclassified e-mail system went down early Thursday; the reason was unknown by late Thursday afternoon.