E-Mail Outage Forces White House to Operate the Oldfangled Way

Shortly after the workweek began, the tech-savvy Obama administration was hit with a mysterious "server outage" that shut down all incoming and outgoing e-mail for more than eight hours, forcing aides to resort to old-fashioned phone calls and face-to-face conversation. How is it possible that the e-mail system for the White House could go down that long, a caller asked? Press secretary Robert Gibbs had just apologized on live television for the lack of any e-mail contact.