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Jan 27, 2009 12:10 PM | 4
The Obama White House was so 1996 yesterday: the new administration’s e-mail crashed, forcing the president’s aides to rely on cell phones, text messaging and (gasp) paper to communicate.
The White House e-mail system uses Microsoft Outlook, and a server outage caused the collapse, an unidentified staffer told The Washington Post. The glitch hit the press office, first lady’s office and other departments, but by this morning was resolved, according to The Washington Times.
"Our apologies if you've e-mailed any of us in the last two and a half hours," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters yesterday. "Our e-mail system is not working so well. So our apologies on that, and we'll endeavor to get you information from earlier in the day, hopefully in a little bit more of a timely manner, if we can get the e-mail to work."
A White House spokesperson didn't have more details on the outage this morning. We'll update you when we get more info.
The e-mail snafu hit a president famous for his Blackberry addiction, who campaigned via MySpace and Twitter, and who unveiled a snazzier looking White House Web site as he was being inaugurated. It no doubt caused a stir among staffers, too, who are accustomed to doing business via e-mail, their Apple Mac laptops and iPhones but arrived at the White House last week to discover desktop PCs running on six-year-old Microsoft software.
The transition, Obama spokesman Bill Burton told The Washington Post then, is "kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari."
Image by Boricuaeddie via Wikimedia Commons
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Barack Obama,
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4 Comments
Add CommentEmail crashes aren't 1996 at all. Outlook & exchange server are made up of a nightmarish tangle of patches each trying to fix the other. Very maintenance heavy. Running six year old versions of them don't help. The white house should be running what we run in the AF, not some hokey off-the-shelf consumer level garbage full of security holes. Ugh.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is what happens when you rely so heavily on anything Microsoft...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, that's what happens when you rely on any Microsoft Crap.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe White House would be better off with some L.A.M.P. Servers, and that is IT!
The White House should upgrade to Linux on the server Backend, and Mac on the Laptops and Desktops.
Linux servers, a Commodore Amiga laptop for each functionary; hybrid multivendor environment, fully meshed topology, open shortest path first, consumer electronics in service of government.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this