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."

Comments

Logical conclusion:

[Archtech]

'... spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters it was not "any external action or interference."'

So just incompetence, then.

Re:Logical conclusion:

[omnichad]

If they don't know what caused it, I don't really know how they can fully rule out external actors being involved.

Re:Logical conclusion:

[El Cubano]

So just incompetence, then.

I came here to say just that. You might be surprised at just how bad it is.

In most cases, government IT is a dumpster fire. I could go on at length, but the absolute best example of it is the failed FBI Virtual Case File project. IEEE did a very in depth write up of it several years ago.

If I recall correctly, the objective was that the FBI tried implement a system after 9/11 that would allow its field agents to collaborate more effectively than phone calls and non-government email (apparently most field agents used things like Yahoo! and HotMail because they either couldn't get government email accounts or they sucked so badly). After years of ill-defined and constantly changing requirements and $300+ million spent, the project was terminated as a failure and the government actually got nothing out of it. Go read the IEEE story on it for more details.

The problem is that this sort of thing happens constantly with projects of all sizes and scopes. Of course, if you've worked in corporate IT, you will recognize that similar things happen there as well.

Re:Logical conclusion:

[MoarSauce123]

I bet on Windows updates going haywire.

Uh, so....

[sconeu]

Hilary's server is still up, right?

[DISCLAIMER: I dislike both parties]

Re:Uh, so....

[jruschme5184]

I was thinking the opposite... someone shut down a Clinton server, not realizing it was the backbone for the entire State Department.

But no big loss.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The Secretary of State remained in complete and continuous contact with all people using a server in the basement of the Secretary's residence. The value of precedent set by a previous secretary of state was greatly appreciated by the Administration.