House E-Mail Returns After Major Outage
Congressional e-mail began flowing again Friday after a severe outage that started Thursday evening and impacted Internet services on handheld devices; shared network drives and some Web sites within the House.gov domain. Chief Administrative Officer Daniel Beard sent a memo to members and aides on Friday informing them that computer engineers had "literally been working around the clock to resolve the issue."
The system failure was due to an overloaded circuit breaker in one of the House's data centers and did not impact server integrity. The outage had nothing to do with slowdowns that were attributed to an enormous flow of e-mail from constituents surrounding the financial bailout package, he said. One aide told Tech Daily Dose that a voicemail was left for staffers saying equipment was being shipped overnight from California to fix the problem.
In his letter, Beard said more energy efficient servers are needed within the House's computing infrastructure, which is something engineers had suspected for some time. He said he will offer a series of recommendations in the coming months that he believes will reduce the system's energy demands and greatly diminish the chance of outages. Meanwhile, IT officials were "fortifying the system with new electrical equipment to create an improved backup system in terms of our computer centers’ power supplies."
Update: CAO sent an e-mail at 1:15 p.m. stating that engineers had restored electrical power to the alternate computing facility data center and are actively restarting services. Delays were expected as a result of a backlog of messages in the mail queue.
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