The Washington Post is reporting this afternoon that the White House E-Mail system has been down for several hours.
As a consequence, newly enacted Executive Orders are being photocopied and have been left sitting on a table outside the briefing room. The Press Office is making use of a loudspeaker system. That is what is being reported, but I am sure the consequences extend beyond that. This incident has attracted quite some notice as here in a CNN blog and here at The Huffington Post.
Keeping a sophisticated email system running requires talent and effort. Even still, this is surprising. As important as communication is to the office of the President of the United States, you would think that various fail-safe mechanisms would be in place. These mechanisms can be implemented internally with all the same security as the primary systems they protect.
Even small business can use service providers like Global Data Vault and take advantage of solutions like Failover to protect important systems.
Barack Obama ran an excellent campaign. He seems have surrounded himself with talented managers. And the tech savvy they have demonstrated is impressive. We certainly wish the new President well, and clearly empathize with his dilemma, but cannot understand how things could get this far out-of-hand.
How could email at the White House go down? Don’t they have a backup plan for the email server? Or was it just overloaded?
A plausible assumption would be that they just moved in, and they were getting acquainted with the computer network hardware that is in place. Perhaps the new Obama geeks had no access before noon on the 20th. Without details, it is hard to know what happened. The timing is certainly suspicious.
The White House has a Microsoft Exchange email server. If they were to upgrade to a more modern system such as Novell’s GroupWise, they would remove the source of the problems.
GroupWise administrators typically have 99.9% uptime and planned downtimes are rarely longer than 20 minutes.