By
Susan Miller
Traffic and shopping aren't the only things that have ground to a standstill during Washington's blizzard of 2010. Add the federal Office of Personnel Management Web site to the list.
Traffic and shopping aren’t the only things that have ground to a standstill in Washington's 2010 blizzard. Add the Office of Personnel Management's Web site to the list.
If you check the status page, you’ll see: “Due to a high volume of traffic, other OPM.gov pages are not available now. Please try back later.”
It turns out, as we learned thanks to a tweet from jlagorio, that there's a status page at Data.gov that does work. Heavy demand apparently forced OPM to move it there, and to make it a single image instead of a standard HTML page.
jlagorio: OPM.gov is so over burdened they moved the operating status page to Data.gov instead. Good thing we have that new site, Mr. President!
mykevandyke: It appears that heavy snow in DC == DDOS against OPM web site.
Later in the day, some of the OPM site re-opened on a "modified" basis, according to the announcement on data.gov.
Mark Drapeau, FCW columnist and director of innovative social engagement at Microsoft U.S. Public Sector (cheeky_geeky), has had some characteristically pithy tweets:
Forget counterterrorism: We need someone on the National Security Council in charge of weather.
Forget open source and open data: "Open government" should mean the government can telework in a snowstorm.
On the positive side, we’ve seen plenty of examples of teleworking in action, like these:
kanesprings: USG in DC closed again today - good "final exam" for all of the grads of our telework training classes
marydavie: we at #GSA are incredibly spoiled w/technology & telework ability. I’ve been able to telework for 15 years.
We’ve also sighted some conversations on the difficulty of people trying to telework having filled out the requisite paperwork ahead of time to get remote access.
weaverbean: Folks OPM states that some folks might have to telework... what do we do if we support teleworkers???
ScottGentzen: @julesdc If it’s done right, it doesn’t matter where IT is or where it is relative to where the users are.
julesdc: @ScottGentzen Key word here is done right. We’re working on it. Not there yet.
So what’s your experience? Can you get to work? Get to the office network? Send us comments below or follow us on twitter.
P.S. Check out the pics of some of the staff teleworking yesterday on Facebook. Post that pic of you working in your pjs.