Slashdot Mirror
US State Department Suffers Worldwide Email Outage (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:
The U.S. State Department's email system underwent a worldwide outage Friday, affecting all its unclassified communications within and outside of the department.
The system was fully restored by Friday afternoon [after 12 hours], said a State Department official briefed on the incident who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.
It was not clear what caused the early morning outage, but spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters it was not "any external action or interference."
It was not clear what caused the early morning outage, but spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters it was not "any external action or interference."
The U.S. State Department's email system underwent a worldwide outage Friday, affecting all its unclassified communications within and outside of the department.
There will be mention of Russia in relation to this unfortunate event, partly as an effort to hide our [inherent] incompetency, sadly.
If they don't know what caused it, I don't really know how they can fully rule out external actors being involved.
If they don't know what caused it, I don't really know how they can fully rule out external actors being involved.
It's actually exceptionally simple, but I'll explain it in detail for you.
Say you are the sysadmin in charge of a server, which goes down one day and so far all you have discovered is that pressing the power button appears to do nothing at all.
Within a minute or two of you discovering this, your boss is asking for a comprehensive detailed report on what is wrong.
You tell him the server won't power up, but you aren't sure why.
Boss asks if it was Russian hackers, to which you look at him like he's a moron for even asking and you say "No, I just said the server isn't powering on"
A moment later your boss sends out a company wide email stating that the server administrators do not know what caused the outage, but have ruled out external actors being involved.
Reporters are similar to your boss in the above made-up situation. They don't care about details and tech stuff and how things work. Their eyes totally glaze over.
The "report" also has the primary goal of being short and concise, without a lot of qualifiers and details, just simple and to the point at the cost of being accurate in ways most reading the report won't care about.
They also likely don't care about attributing words to you that you did or did not say.
This all combines to get the result you see and are confused by, and is almost always what happens when your words get filtered through other people like this.